Bob Ainsworth
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Mr Bob Ainsworth (Coventry North East) (Lab)
It is a great pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Cleethorpes (Martin Vickers). I agree with an awful lot of what he said. However, I most certainly disagree with the most high-profile thing that he said about the Prime Minister’s advocacy. I do not want the Prime Minister to come to Coventry to advocate for an elected mayor. That would not go down nearly as well as it might in the hon. Gentleman’s constituency.
I cannot boast 26 years in local government as the hon. Gentleman can, but I did eight years as a member of Coventry city council before being elected to this place. It has long been my view—after about a year of settling in and getting to understand how the system worked, I became pretty disillusioned with it—that I do not believe that it works. I do not believe that it can be made to work.
In 2001, Labour proposed elected mayors. We set up a system that all hon. Members in this Chamber will know allowed for a petition to be raised, as the hon. Gentleman mentioned, to get a referendum. Not many petitions have been raised. If I believed that the reason for those petitions not being raised over that intervening period was a high level of satisfaction with the current system and that nobody really wanted change, I assure the House that my support for the mayoral model would have waned considerably. However, the petitions have not been raised because we face, as the hon. Member for Bristol North West (Charlotte Leslie) said earlier, almost total apathy in respect of local government. We do not have—we do not enjoy—local democracy in England at all; it does not exist.
On 3 May, a third of the people of Coventry will vote, and they will do so almost overwhelmingly on national issues, not local issues. Political parties and councillors know and understand that. Indeed, I have not studied the Conservative leaflets in Coventry—if they have been put out at all—but my own party’s leaflets cover police and NHS cuts, overwhelmingly. Why? We know that that is how to appeal to the electorate, and we want to win. This is not about council services, development of the manifesto locally or about what the council is or is not going to do. The product of that is a massive increase in apathy about local democracy, the potential for local leadership and the important services that councils provide.
There is also an impact on councillors. In what other walk of life would we consider it good and acceptable—something that we ought to continue with—to have a system where people know that their policies, credible or incredible, make no difference to their success. However, local government elections can be affected organisationally; we have all done it and participated in it.
Councillors and councils fall or stand on the national trend. Councillors know that. In 2004, the Labour party lost control of Coventry city council, not because we as a party lost control of it or because it was a bad council, but because in that year the then Prime Minister, Tony Blair, was somewhat unpopular in the country. It was as simple as that. We wound up with a Conservative council for six years, which fell in 2010, in large part because the local election was on the same day as the general election and, in an overwhelmingly Labour city, the turnout was well up and the Conservative council was swept away as a result. I do not think that that was a particularly good council—it was worthy of considerable criticism—but it knew, and we knew, that it would lose an election called on 6 May 2010.
Mr John Leech (Manchester, Withington) (LD)
Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that support for local government and more interest in local politics would be helped by never having local elections on the same day as a general election?
Mr Ainsworth
I have not thought about that and I am not dead sure about the degree to which it would, but having a mayoral system in our cities—like the hon. Gentleman, I would be interested in the proposition going further than just in cities—would provide some mitigation against the domination of national politics in local affairs. Of course, the national trend would still have an effect; to suggest that it would disappear entirely would be naive.
On the suggestion about replacing local politics with independents, I am sure that we all know people from our parties who share our beliefs but choose to cover their colours in particular parts of the country, because they know that if they wear their rosette and show their colours they will not get elected. Therefore, they stand as independents. That is, to a degree, dishonest.
A mayoral system, such as we are seeing in London and will see elsewhere, would force people to think well beyond the allegiances of their own political party and about the city as a whole: Coventry, for example. That would give people at least a degree of ability to buck the national trend. People would be, to a greater extent than exists at the moment, genuinely accountable to their local populations, surviving on their own abilities, popularity and the policies that they pursued and, therefore, their ability, to some degree only, to get themselves re-elected off the back of their own policies.
The mayoral system would bring those benefits and the potential for leadership. In saying that, I do not denigrate councillors. Many people dedicate themselves to local government over the years, toiling away, trying to make their cities and communities better places for little remuneration, but they are largely—it is not their own fault—unknown within the communities that they represent. Walking the streets of Coventry, the majority of people do not know who the leader of the council is. That is not the fault of the leader of the council. The Conservative leader of the council for six years, up to 2010, was largely unknown as well. The system prevents them from being able to give the leadership that is so necessary in the modern world.
Those of us who have been lucky enough over the years to travel and to mix and converse with leaders of cities in other countries, know that in many countries—those with which we have to compete—there is a far higher degree of self-reliance. People in cities in Germany do not look in much degree to Berlin, or even to Stuttgart or Munich, for leadership. There is a lot of leadership and a lot more powers in the city itself and, as a result, those cities are more successful.
None of the democratic deficit that I have been talking about, however, matters much to our constituents if it does not make a difference.
Charlotte Leslie
Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that continuity of leadership is important? In a city such as Bristol, where the council changes colours frequently, there has been a number of council leaders over the past 10 years. Recognising the council leaders is even more difficult, because they change so often, and that makes the long-term, strategic vision for an area far more difficult.
Mr Ainsworth
I am not so sure that I do agree. There are communities that are far more settled—there is more community in existence—and where people will be better known, although in many of our cities that is certainly not the case, because there is a turnover of population and a loss of community. It almost does not matter how long some individuals toil away at leading their city, the majority of the population probably do not know who they are.
I was about to move on to the potential benefits of bridging the democratic deficit, because none of it matters greatly to the majority of the people of this country or to the electorate in such places if it is not making a difference. Irrespective of our political views, how many of us believe that our cities are doing as well as they could? None of us believes that, so we ought to be looking for some improvement, not only for democratic reasons but for economic regeneration and performance.
Coventry, the city in which I was born and raised, is the most central city in England; we have excellent transport links, rail and road, to every corner of the country; we enjoy a pleasant environment for the city—the Warwickshire countryside is second to none—and we have an enterprising population. Why therefore are we not doing better than we are? With leadership, we could be doing that little bit better and be pushing that little bit harder. To return to the issue of democracy, in Coventry we would probably be demanding—with credibility—increased powers to be able to lead the city. In recent years, the people of London have managed to get from central Government increased powers over their own local government, under both Ken and Boris. The people of Scotland and Wales have managed the same, but otherwise our local government is so weak in comparison with Whitehall and Westminster that it has been unable to get the powers that it needs to represent properly its constituencies and communities, which deserve so much.
With a mayoral system, over time, local government would get those powers. I know all the arguments about not much being on offer, but that is not how things work. When we set up the London Mayor, there were far fewer powers than now, but the Mayors have been back to the well and asked for more water, as have Scotland and Wales. Would not powerful mayors in English cities ask for exactly the same? They would, and they would be in a far better position to get it.
Mayors would be a big improvement in how cities are run and in how the country is run. Think of the benefit of powerful people from the provinces—from Bristol, from Leeds—talking to this place from outside London and saying, irrespective of party, “Oi, mate! That ain’t how it works in the real world.” They would be listened to. I am afraid that I do not know who the leader of Leeds is, or of Bristol, although I know the leader of Coventry and who the mayor of Leicester is, but if someone like me, steeped in politics, does not know who the leaders of our great cities are, that is an indication that local government is not punching its weight in our country.
Lilian Greenwood (Nottingham South) (Lab)
My right hon. Friend is making an interesting argument about giving cities more powers. However, in London, the Mayor represents 32 local authorities, which is very different from a city such as Nottingham, which is too small to take on those extra powers. The opportunity should be on offer for city regions, rather than single local authorities.
Mr Ainsworth
My own party played with the idea of city regions when we were in power. We thought seriously about them, and they might work in some areas. I do not come from Greater Manchester, but my impression is that that area is a real entity. If so, a metro-mayor or whatever for Greater Manchester might make a lot of sense. The west midlands, however, is not such an area. The proposition that we were toying with was a city region from Telford in the west to Coventry in the east—some 50-odd miles—which is not a real community.
I agree with the hon. Member for Cleethorpes: we should build institutions on real communities—existing, recognisable ones that people already see themselves as part of and buy into—and give them the necessary and relevant powers. Let us have some real local government, not an imposed London template; let us look from the bottom up and not from the top down. What is Coventry capable of doing on its own? Let us empower Coventry to do those things on its own, and if Birmingham is capable of a different set of things, let us empower Birmingham to do those different things. Let us stop thinking from the top and start thinking from the bottom, if we want a revival of our democracy and the potential help to our economy.
Finally, from the point of view of my own little city of Coventry, I fear that, with Leicester already having a mayor, if Birmingham has one and we do not, we will lose a relevant voice and a say. I do not want my city to be any less influential than it is—quite the reverse.