City Regions and Metro Mayors

Debate between Barry Sheerman and John Pugh

Tuesday 9th June 2015 Westminster Hall

[Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)]

There is a great deal of confusion about the real shape of the metropolitan areas and the Metro Mayors. Has the hon. Gentleman seen the research that suggests that the emphasis on big cities such as Leeds or Manchester will squeeze and have a deleterious effect on smaller towns and cities, such as my town of Huddersfield?

[John Pugh]

I will come to that point later, but the hon. Gentleman is absolutely right.

The interesting thing is that this is the sort of devolution that people have requested and want. There is clamour up and down the northern cities and conurbations—people are saying, “Let’s have a Metro Mayor.” But it is a Government-knows-best, Procrustean model. The Chancellor has been explicit that proper, full devolution—devolution that is worth anything—will be on that model. If I were being unkind, I could accuse the Government of dogmatism, ideological stupidity, blind prejudice or even a predilection for civic Mussolinis, but I am genuinely struggling to follow their argument. There is no evidence from anywhere in the world that conurbations with all-powerful mayors thrive any better or any worse than those that do not. Some clearly do, but a lot do not; governance is not always a decisive factor. There is no evidence that one man alone always makes a better decision than a leader surrounded by his peers or a group of adequately informed, able people.

There is an appreciable body of evidence that shows that systems that invest power in a single decision-maker are vulnerable to a number of things. They are vulnerable to cronyism—that kind of accusation has been made against the Mayor of London. They are vulnerable, in the long term, to an element of corruption, as decisions become less transparent, and to political obtuseness and people flying a kite—I am thinking of things such as Boris’s island airport. Collective decisions, rather than individual decisions, are always more transparent and more open to challenge, because they have to be argued for. They are not always quicker, which may be why the Government are infatuated with the Metro Mayor idea, but if corporate bodies are required to make quick decisions, most can think of an intelligent scheme of delegation that enables them to deal with the particular problem. Few people would argue that a President of the United States, surrounded by advisers, perforce and naturally makes better decisions than a Prime Minister of England, who has a Cabinet and has to get things through Parliament.

In Merseyside, we have a particular problem. From our point of view, it is essential that decisions that affect the whole region have proper input from all parts of the region. All voices—those of Southport, Sefton, the Wirral and St Helens—should be heard. It is not simply all about Liverpool. One person, however good, qualified and sensitive they are, is unlikely to be equally alert and caring or equally bothered about all areas.

In my area—right on the margins of the Liverpool city region—we worry about marginalisation. We are already in a borough that is controlled by no one elected by Southport or who belongs to a party that has been elected in Southport. There is genuine unhappiness about being in the council we are in, and we will make representations later in the Parliament about boundary changes. But how much worse will it be for my constituency when not even a Sefton voice is involved in the decisions that directly affect us? We will become a marginalised community.

Our tourism, for example, could be overlooked in Liverpool’s drive to boost its own tourist economy. There does not seem to be an adequate restraint on that. Following on from the intervention of the hon. Member for Huddersfield (Mr Sheerman), what we want is a better engagement with the areas immediately outside the city region. It is important to us to find out what is going to happen in our neighbouring authority, west Lancashire—a district highly dependent on the city region economy, but exiled from it, no part of it and not able to join it. We need to talk about transport links with west Lancashire, and it is not obvious that having a Metro Mayor would be of any assistance to us.

The situation genuinely would not be so bad if, as in the ResPublica pamphlet, which backed the proposal of “Devo Manc”, the prospect of a Metro Mayor was presented as an option—as something in the toolkit. But it is not; it is a precondition, regardless of local opinion. It is not devolution by demand, but almost devolution as the Chancellor demands. To that extent, it has to be questioned.

I do not think these problems are unique to the area of Merseyside, or even just to Merseyside, Manchester and the north-west. The same issues can be found in Tyneside, the Sheffield area and Birmingham. The fact that Manchester has been such a success recently in terms of its devolution—it was picked as an early candidate for devolution without a Metro Mayor—proves how tangential the presence of a Metro Mayor is to genuine devolution.

Let me conclude by summarising the problem. We want devolution, just like the Scots—it would be nice, of course, to have the same level of per capita funding—but the Government’s offer, as it is at the moment, is simply piecemeal. We are leaving many areas completely orphaned. We are patronising other areas by suggesting that they can only have one particular form of governance, regardless of what the electorate actually wants, otherwise they will not get the funding that devolved areas will have. We are marginalising communities, such as mine of Southport, within the city region, and we are confronted with a wholly unproven, unevidenced strategy.

The worst thing is that there is absolutely no opportunity for the people who are supposed to be the beneficiaries of this devolution to have or express a view on the template that the Government offer them. That is not devolution; it is imposition.

Academies Bill [Lords]

Debate between Barry Sheerman and John Pugh

Monday 19th July 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Sheerman]

I am afraid that I must disagree with the hon. Lady. I go into many schools, and one head will say, “I can’t do my job; I can’t cope; I can’t do anything, because of the amount of bureaucracy, red tape and all that,” yet in an almost exactly similar school, with a good leadership, the head will say, “Bureaucracy, red tape. We skip over that. We run the school for the children. And that all comes later, and we deal with it.” I am always suspicious, because I guarantee that the House will spend time over the next years introducing all sort of things—health and safety, child protection and child safety measures, and so on—and that we will end up with more bureaucracy in schools. We will gladly do both things at the same time.

[Dr Pugh]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Mr Sheerman]

May I continue for the moment?

I worry about the speed at which the Bill is being considered and the fact that the debates in Committee will be constrained to three days. That makes the Bill look like a bit of panicky measure. A couple of interventions rather upset me. An hon. Gentleman—an old friend of mine—asked whether the policy was similar to that on grant-maintained status, as did another Back Bencher. I hope that the policy is not a reversion to that. If that is all that it is—a return to the old grant-maintained situation—I really believe that it is a backward step.

Let us put all this into perspective. Sometimes, even among colleagues in the Tea Room, I ask, “How many secondary schools do you think there are in England?” and they often get it wildly wrong. There are 3,500, and there are about 20,000 primary schools. Many people do not know that. How many academies did we aim for? Two hundred, rising to 400—between 5% and 6% of secondary schools have academy status. It was a pilot, which makes me wonder why it caused so much passion, even among Labour Members. Indeed, the shadow Secretary of State was very passionately against academies at one stage in his career, early in the days when I was Chairman of the Select Committee. Academies were an interesting and successful pilot. They have not been given enough time. On the freedoms that we gave academies, yes, schools should be able to have that status on licence if they meet the standard.

I want to pursue another point. I, too, believe that the most worrying part of the Bill is the bit about free schools. I can understand the argument for academies, and I know why the Government are doing this—I can understand all that—but the question of free schools worries me indeed, not because of the suggestion that, somehow, the private sector will insidiously come in and run our schools. The Labour Government used the private sector all the time in education. Of course, we have to do so, and it is a healthy relationship: the private sector is a very good partner. It delivers all sorts of things. We called it into a number of local authorities to sort things out when they failed. So let us view the private sector as part of the solution and the answer, rather than thinking that it will come in through the back door.

I am worried about a different feature of free schools. When Tony Blair was very keen on faith schools, those of us who looked at them were concerned about the way in which they were delivered too easily to people who just said, “I want a faith school,” because they happened to have a certain brand of religion or to be a certain kind of Muslim or Christian. Without great care, that way leads to a deal of disunity and the break-up of social cohesion in our towns and cities. I would hate free schools to lead to that break-up. Baroness Sharp put it very well in the other place when she said that every area has a community of schools and that, if the legislation breaks up that community, we will put ourselves in great danger of harming the unity of our communities.

Consultation with schools, pupils and parents is very important, but it is still very weak under the Bill. The more I look at the Bill, the more concerned I am. We take so much notice of the governors of a school at one moment in time, but the school will go on for another 50 or 100 years. The school that I went to is, I think, still going after 500 years. The fact is that asking the question of one small set of school governors today will bind in a whole community, and the school at the centre of the community. The community should have something to say about the future of education in that community.

All the work that I have done in education has led me to believe that we have to give schools a decent chance of teaching a representative bunch of kids from the community—not all the poorest, not all the richest, but a good blend. Sometimes one has to be brave in how one selects; sometimes one has to be very brave. People should read the Sutton Trust report on how to handle school admissions. The Committee that I chaired did some very good work on admissions, and the schools admissions scene has been transformed in the direction that we recommended. There will always be schools that are better than others, and envy about not being able to get into those better schools. The Sutton Trust is right: the only way to sort that out is to have a fair system of banding, and when there is high demand for school places, there should be admission by ballot.