John Redwood
Main Page: John Redwood (Conservative - Wokingham)Devolution in England
John Redwood Excerpts
Mr Betts
I hear what the right hon. Gentleman says and I think the issue of accountability is important, but it can be dealt with in a number of ways. Instinctively, my view is that these things should be decided at a local level, and areas may come to different views about how accountability should be exercised. I do not think that it is up to us to prescribe one model for how that should happen.
Robert Neill (Bromley and Chislehurst) (Con)
Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
Mr Speaker
Order. We are not having an identity parade, but I think the hon. Gentleman has the right hon. Member for Wokingham (Mr Redwood) in mind.
Mr Redwood
I am grateful to the Chairman of the Select Committee. When the members of his Committee looked at the big devolution of powers, including that of income tax to Scotland, did they ask themselves how England would settle such issues? Is there not a need for income tax to be settled at England level, just as there is not power in Scotland?
Mr Betts
There are two aspects to that intervention. The first is that we did not look at income tax, although we said at the end of the report that, in terms of fiscal devolution, there is a case for considering income tax and VAT further. That is an issue for the future, but we recognise that it has to be addressed. The second issue probably strays into the area of English votes on English laws, which the Committee did not go into, but there is a case for devolution within England to more local areas irrespective of how Parliament addresses the other issue.
Damian Collins (Folkestone and Hythe) (Con)
I congratulate the Select Committee on its report and the hon. Member for Sheffield South East (Mr Betts) as Chairman on his excellent speech introducing it. He is right that there is a consensus between the political parties on the need for, and role of, greater devolution. In my view, that should include devolution of powers not just from central government to local and regional government, but ultimately from local government to communities as well. I shall touch on that in my remarks.
The topical issue in this debate is about the northern powerhouse, the Manchester area and the devolution of powers from central Government to that Greater Manchester authority on matters including economic development and infrastructure, and health and social care. I am sure we will hear more from hon. Members from that region as the debate proceeds. In my region of Kent, however, many people looking at that level of devolution would probably welcome it and like to see it in their area, too.
The Select Committee Chairman rightly highlighted the number of city and county areas in the country that are of comparable size to other devolved areas of government. Kent, for example, has a similar size of population and parliamentary representation as Northern Ireland, which is a clearly defined area. If devolution can be managed in Northern Ireland, I think it can be managed in an English county authority, particularly one with more than 1.5 million people, as well. I would like to see this form of devolution—incorporating the planning of major economic projects, major investments and major infrastructure projects. We can take a county-wide view, lobby the Government for money, plan for the future and have the power to manage more of the investment ourselves and to create our own priorities, particular for transport infrastructure.
The debate about the integration and local management of health and social services also reflects something that many hon. Members would recognise and agree with for their own communities—the fact that greater integration between the management of those two resources is essential. We need to consider the experience of patients either being treated in the health service or receiving social care in their community so that they end up on one single pathway of care that can be managed by different bodies. The more they are integrated and the more their budgets are managed together, the better the results will be.
As we all know from our constituency case work, when a vulnerable person needs urgent and expensive medical care, we know exactly how that should be dealt with and it is often easy to provide for it, whereas when someone needs less expensive intervention at a lower level to support independent living at home, the money may be harder to find. I believe that if we adopted a more strategic approach and viewed such cases alongside each other, we would deliver not only better value for money for the taxpayer but better outcomes for patients.
Mr Redwood
Does my hon. Friend agree that we also need an England level of decision making when it comes to strategic railways, strategic roads and major health policies? We already have that in Whitehall Departments, but is there not a fundamental injustice if Members of Parliament from other parts of the United Kingdom can vote on such issues when they are England-only issues handled by England Ministers?
Damian Collins
I agree that powers and decisions should not be forced on English communities by MPs who are not affected by the outcomes of their votes. However, I think that there is a case for devolution of the kind that we have seen in the Greater Manchester area to large English authorities—county authorities such as Kent county council, for instance—which should be able to take a strategic lead. My right hon. Friend is right about major infrastructure projects. Local enterprise partnership boards, for instance, are often better placed than someone in Whitehall to know which road and which rail network should be made a priority for funding and investment. Local leadership of that kind is greatly to be welcomed.
Mr John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con)
We are debating devolution in England, but if we are to have more devolution in England, we first need devolution to England. We must make sure that there is an English level of decision making for the strategic matters, and English Ministers who can then decide which matters could be properly devolved within their strategic framework.
If we take the case of transport, it is predominantly or wholly an English Department, yet it is treated as if it were a Department of the Union. But our Ministers have no control or influence over the roads of Northern Ireland or Scotland. They deal predominantly with English issues. In the new looser federation that we are going to create in the next Parliament, we need to identify the need for England to have rights and opportunities that equal these powers that the other parts of the country have already gained or will gain in the more generous devolution settlements now being offered to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
There is a good case for the English Transport Department to devolve some more powers to unitary, county and borough councils in the country. On the issue of railways, for example, we have a very expensive nationalised industry, which decides on the track, the track maintenance, the track investment and the principal train routes and is responsible for the signalling and most of the stations. These are very important issues for local communities. They are massive budgets, but I found it extremely difficult as a local representative to get the ear of Network Rail and to get the right attention paid to the railway line in my area, even though my voters are producing a great deal of tax revenue which is going into Network Rail. A case can be made that there should be more devolved power to counties, boroughs, unitaries and maybe even to MPs over railway budgets, which can have a very important impact on the face of the town, the nature of the countryside and the commuter and freight services available.
We must be careful not to devolve too much. For the roads system, it is right that there is a strategic highway network of motorways and larger trunk roads which is controlled at the England level, masquerading as the Union level, and that those decisions should be properly taken by an English Minister responsible to this House, spending moneys collected in the normal national way and going through the national budgets. I hope that in due course we will have a proper English devolved budget, just as Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland do.
In my area, we have a motorway that is a local road, and the council is responsible for it. It is a very useful and good motorway, but it stops at the boundary with Oxfordshire and Reading. Most of us want it to go over the river and on to more useful places as part of our economic growth and development. We are making a huge contribution in our area, with a lot of extra housing and jobs, and we need more road space, but Oxfordshire will not allow us to put a bridge over the river and take the road on to other parts of our burgeoning area and up towards Oxford. That may be a case where a devolved power should be given back. I think that my unitary borough would be happy to surrender control of the motorway in return for a promise from a Government Minister to finish the job and make the motorway go to other places so that it could take more of our traffic. At the moment, a very large amount of traffic has to go through the neighbouring constituency of my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary in the small and beautiful village of Sonning, which has a single-track bridge over a beautiful stretch of the river. That takes a massive amount of commuter and freight traffic that ought to go on a motorway-standard bridge, away from a place of such great beauty, but we cannot do that because of the way in which parts of local government relate to one another. Those are two examples: one where we could devolve more once we had the right powers in England, and one where we might want to devolve less to get a better strategic answer at the national level.
The health service is also primarily or wholly an English Department. It is called the Department of Health, but it should really be called the Department of English Health because its Ministers do not run the health service in Scotland, in particular—although in the recent debates on Scottish devolution some people seemed not to understand that and to think that Scotland’s vote would somehow have an impact on their health service when it has been devolved to the Scottish Parliament. If we are going to pursue devolution, English Ministers should ask the question that my right hon. Friend the Chancellor has asked, and started to answer, in the case of Manchester. If it makes sense for Manchester to have more control over health budgets at local authority level to try to deal with the big border issues between social care and health, it must make sense for other parts of England to have exactly the same type of thing.
All my life in active politics and in government, as a local government Minister and in other roles such as Secretary of State for Wales, I was very conscious that there were always border issues between the UK-wide nationally controlled health service and local government, dealing with social care. Both sides were prone to blame each other. The health service would say, “We could get our costs down and put more people through our hospitals if only local government did a better job on providing care facilities for people who should leave hospital,” and local government would say, “Our budgets have been starved because so much money goes to health, but perhaps that isn’t the right priority, because it is a lot more expensive to keep someone in a hospital bed for a few extra days when they do not need the urgent care any more than it is to provide them with good care in a care home without all the medical staff and additions that you have in a hospital.”
There has always been that problem, and I look forward to seeing the more detailed work and the results of the negotiations, because it would be good if there could be a new solution. Once again, however, we need to make sure that the right things are defined at the England level, because it is still meant to be a national health service, although there are now going to be several different national health services because of Scottish and other devolution. In relation to England, I think that a lot of our voters in England want there to be national standards, a national level of service, national protocols and national agreements, so quite a lot needs to be settled by an English national Minister sitting in the English Health Department. However, we can see whether we can devolve certain things. It would be really good to have a new and novel solution to the cross-border issues between social care and health care.
The third Department that is already clearly an English Department is the Department for Communities and Local Government—the origin of this debate. The Select Committee has produced an interesting report to influence English local government Ministers. They must make sure that they have unrestricted English control over English local government, and I am sure that many of them, in this Government and successor Governments, will be interested in exploring the big issue of how many more things can reasonably be left to councillors and their serving officers to decide. I look forward to there being more things and I have suggested one, namely railways, but we need to be realistic and understand that people also want a national agreed level of service. They also want to know that, when a decision in one place has a consequence on other places, people above the fray of the locality will be making the decisions. Not all the decisions will go downwards; some will have to go upwards.
Above all, we need justice for England. We need English votes for English issues and to make sure that England has a voice and can decide the things that apply only to England.
Lisa Nandy (Wigan) (Lab)
I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield South East (Mr Betts) and his Committee on such an important report and on giving us the opportunity to have what I hope will be a much more thoughtful, detailed and nuanced debate about recent devolution proposals.
I want to reflect in particular on what is happening in my area of Greater Manchester. I am a passionate advocate of real devolution to people, communities and those who serve them. Before I entered Parliament, my experience of almost 10 years working with children and young people in some of the most challenging circumstances told me that we will not deal with the most intractable problems this country faces if we do not move away from a deficit-based model of dealing with people towards an asset-based model. That requires decisions to be taken much closer to people, with greater local accountability and people and their communities in the driving seat on decisions that affect them, their families and their lives.
I particularly welcome some of the decisions that are being devolved to Greater Manchester, including on transport, skills and the Work programme. Such issues are critical to solving our intractable problems. One of the great fallacies is that it is possible to solve local problems at national level. Too often, national policy fails not just because it does not identify the right solutions, but because it does not define the problems properly. That is because those problems differ not just from region to region, but from local area to local area, within constituencies as well as among them.
Devolution gives areas such as mine in Wigan and across Greater Manchester a considerable opportunity to draw on our strengths. It will give us the chance to move away from handing out big block contracts to the small number of private companies that are currently the only ones able to bid and compete for them, and instead to work with the charities and community groups that are the lifeblood of our local area and to draw on the talent throughout regions such as mine.
Given how incredibly centralised this country is, it is incredible that there has been so much local and regional success over the years. A particular example from my own region that springs to mind is when, finally, after years and years of pushing and lobbying, the regional development agency, working in partnership with Government and the media companies, managed to get the BBC to relocate to MediaCity. That has been an absolutely stunning success for many of my constituents and the region. It has brought a completely fresh perspective to the way in which our public debate is conducted, because the guests and presenters now come from a much broader area than a small few miles around the capital.
I am very concerned, however, about what has unfolded in Greater Manchester over recent months. The people of Greater Manchester have been treated with contempt, because they have been cut out of the process. Real devolution is based on the principle of consent, not contempt. My hon. Friend has said that one of the reasons he is so committed to the agenda is that it can re-energise the democratic process. I absolutely agree with him, but the problem in Greater Manchester is that, from the very day the process was leaked to the media and then announced at a press conference, the public have been entirely cut out of the conversation. I want to say, particularly to Ministers, that that cannot be allowed to continue. There is a significant opportunity to bring benefits to areas such as mine and others across the country, but not if the public continue to be cut out of the conversation.
We were denied a referendum about this plan, which came out of the blue, to impose a mayor who will be appointed, not elected, for between two and four years. Cutting the public out of the conversation was not a good start. When the people of the city of Manchester were given a referendum a few years ago, they said that they did not want an elected mayor, although the result was quite close, but my constituents in Wigan have never been asked that question. They may have voted for it, and if we had been given some detail about how the mayor would be held to account, I might even have campaigned and voted for it, but the truth is that we have been cut out of the conversation.
We will continue to be cut out of the conversation because the Government have confirmed to me that not only will the mayor be appointed immediately and rule until 2017, but that the term may be extended until 2019 by the same local authority leaders who negotiated the deal. That reminds me of Tony Benn’s five questions for the powerful, the most important of which are:
“To whom are you accountable? And how can we get rid of you?”
He said:
“If you cannot get rid of the people who govern you, you do not live in a democratic system.”
It is 2015, not 1815: people deserve the right to elect the politicians who wield enormous power over their lives.
I am not confident that the situation is going to get better. In a series of recent written answers, the Minister has confirmed that no thought whatsoever has been given to the ongoing scrutiny by or involvement of the public in these decisions. I had to ring three Departments to get the Greater Manchester health and social care devolution memorandum of understanding”, before the Government realised that it had been published by the first Department I had rung and pointed me to an obscure place on its website to find it. The document says this about April 2015, which is next month:
“Process for establishment of shadow governance arrangements agreed and initiated”.
My question is: by whom and with whom? From the document, it looks as though local authority leaders, clinical commissioning groups and NHS England will make up some kind of shadow governance arrangements, but we do not have any more details, even though it is all supposed to happen in the next four weeks. I must tell the Minister that he should be very concerned about that, given that every hon. Member has referred to the importance of local democracy and accountability. We have 10 local authority leaders and a huge range of appointed officials from CCGs and NHS England, with an appointed mayor, but no room for direct elections for another two to four years.
The consultation by the Department for Communities and Local Government ran for three weeks from the middle of January to the beginning of February. There were 12 responses, of which 10 came from the local authority leaders who negotiated the deal in the first place. I must say to my hon. Friend the Member for Blackley and Broughton (Graham Stringer) that I very much share his concerns about the Healthier Together process: we were both heavily critical of its consultation process, but that sort of public engagement makes Healthier Together look like an absolute dream.
This consultation asked for the impact on communities, but according to the Minister’s own Department, it was not advertised, so there were no responses from the public. The document did not make a single mention of health care or the national health service; yet one week after it closed, we were told via a leak to the Manchester Evening News and then in a press conference that billions of pounds of public funding were being transferred. In the meantime, £13.5 million of public money—our money—has been spent on transforming Manchester town hall to get ready for the new bureaucracy. This is not the way to build power-sharing with people.
Mr Redwood
Would the hon. Lady agree with all this if the new mayor were directly elected to a quicker timetable?
Lisa Nandy
The right hon. Gentleman has helped me brilliantly to segue into what must happen next. The truth is that for Greater Manchester, this is where we are. We have been handed this model and, as many hon. Members have said, there are opportunities for the region if we can get it right, and it is important that we do not make the same mistakes again. The Government tell us that they are committed to rolling out devolution arrangements around the country, and we must get that right for the people of Greater Manchester. We need clarity about the role of local councillors who currently do not have the tools and resources they need to hold the leadership to account. When we devolve power upwards to combined authority level, the issue becomes even more pressing and critical. The local councillor is the link between people in my constituency on different streets and different communities around Wigan, and decisions that are taken miles away in Manchester town hall. As someone recently said to me in Wigan, “If I can’t hold any of these people to account, it’s the same to me wherever they are sitting.” We need clarity about the role of local councillors, and we must ensure that they have the tools and resources they need to hold power to account.
The memorandum mentions the principle of subsidiarity. I share a commitment to that, but we deserve to know what it means in practice. For example, there are huge benefits to be had from rolling together health and social care, and in my local area in Wigan that is what the local authority and CCGs have been doing because we face a wide variation in health and social care challenges across Greater Manchester. Mine is an older borough that contains lots of people with chronic health conditions and real geographical challenges—we are one of the biggest boroughs in Greater Manchester. The risk is that when we level up those decisions, we end up with serious problems because we ignore pressing issues in different local areas.
We should have, and deserve, direct elections if people are to make decisions that affect our lives, particularly if we are to concentrate power in the hands of one individual. A potential four years before anyone gets a say over who takes those decisions is ridiculous and shows utter contempt. Many people have said that this is not a London-style mayor. They are right, because at the very least the Mayor of London is directly elected and has to account to the Greater London authority, in public, for their decisions. There are no plans in Greater Manchester for similar scrutiny arrangements, which shows a complete and utter lack of respect for the public.
Finally, there is a huge gap around civil society, and I understand why this debate looks like a conversation between national and regional politicians from which the public have been excluded. Charities, community groups—nobody has been spoken to or consulted, and they do not have access to the information and data they need to hold power to account. The risk is that we are replicating the worst features of national Government at regional and sub-regional level.
This is not a binary choice between unaccountable power structures in London and unaccountable power structures in Manchester. We can do so much better than that: real accountability and real challenge in the system; meaningful tools to hold people to account; no more backroom deals; and real power sharing. The people in my region are our best asset. Let us build our public services with them, not without them.
Andy Sawford (Corby) (Lab/Co-op)
It is a pleasure to respond to this interesting and constructive debate. In common with other hon. Members, when I am out and about visiting school and community groups, groups of elderly residents and so forth, I am often asked what it is like in Parliament and people share their disdain for how Parliament behaves, particularly at Prime Minister’s Question Time, for example. I regret that members of the public do not so often encounter debates such as this one, in which interesting contributions are made from all sides and a measure of agreement is reached about devolution, along with some significant differences about how to devolve power and how to engage the public in the debate.
The report that has provided much of the focus of today’s debate makes a strong and passionate case for further devolution in England. I found it telling that none of the submissions to the inquiry opposed further devolution. The case for localism in the UK is overwhelming, and the case for further devolution within England—the great unfinished business of Labour’s long-term commitment to devolution across the UK—is overwhelming, too.
The report identifies a shared consensus that we have reached a “high water mark” of powers maintained in Whitehall, and I agree with that assessment. The report identifies three key features through which changes can be made to the way in which local government is funded and to the powers it possesses. I agree with the first recommendation that
“any system of devolution should recognise need while balancing incentives for local areas to build up their economies.”
The debate has provided an interesting airing of the tension in the report between those two aspects, which I commend to anyone looking at how best to grapple with it. I agree, too, that
“power should be devolved to groups of local authorities, covering a recognisable large-scale area, that can demonstrate how they share, and work together as, a functioning economy.”
Thirdly, I agree that
“a strong, locally agreed governance model”
is required, as my hon. Friend the Member for Rochdale (Simon Danczuk) strongly suggested.
The report, I think rightly, does not prescribe a particular governance model, unlike this Government who are determined to force metro-mayors on English cities—without, as my hon. Friend the Member for Wigan (Lisa Nandy) said, any proper public consultation. In fact, following public consultation some years ago, that very idea was rejected.
We broadly welcome all three proposals. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield South East (Mr Betts), the Chairman of the Communities and Local Government Committee, and the other members of the Committee, many of whom have spoken, on their excellent work in producing this report, and indeed on all the excellent work they have done over this Parliament in scrutinising the work of the Department for Communities and Local Government as thoughtful advocates for localism.
I am disappointed that we have had to wait eight months for the Government’s response to this report. Why are we having this incredibly important debate just four weeks before this Parliament dissolves? Could it be that the Government have something to hide? It is noticeable that on the equalisation and redistribution recommendations, the Government response does not refer at all to the importance of having a needs-based element to the funding.
This Government have paid lip service to localism, but the rhetoric has not often matched the reality. Far from feeling empowered by this Government, councils feel emasculated. They have been consistently attacked by the Secretary of State, who vents his opinion on everything from the level of reserves councils should hold to how often the bins should be collected. At the same time, councils have been subjected to the biggest cuts of any part of the public sector, despite being recognised at the beginning of this Parliament as the most efficient part of it.
There is much talk of savings and efficiency, but we know that the reality in many communities around the country is of councils trying to do their very best, but now having to make serious cuts that impact on people’s lives. Core funding reductions in local government are an average real-terms cut of 40%, but the cuts were not spread fairly. Some areas have had huge cuts. Reductions in spending have hit areas with the highest needs hardest, and projections for 2017-18 suggest that by that time there might be a difference in cuts of nearly £1,000 per head between the least and worst-affected communities.
On many occasions we have debated the figures that the Government use to illustrate local government spending power, so I shall not focus too much on them today, other than to say that no one and nobody—not the Local Government Association, not the National Audit Office, not the Select Committee and not the Public Accounts Committee—believes that the Government provide a true reflection of the levels of resource available to local authorities, of the deep unfairness of those cuts and of the challenges that presents. This provides an important context for understanding devolution, but let me say that I think it makes the case for devolution even stronger. We must be thoughtful about how we implement it at a time when councils are under such huge strain.
I cannot agree with the assessment of the hon. Member for Cleethorpes (Martin Vickers) that the districts are dying. I see districts doing incredible work. My own local authority of Corby is doing great things in our local area—building new council houses, backing regeneration and working with me to improve the local labour market by trying to cut bad practice by agencies. Our districts are doing great work, as are all levels of local government, but they are faced with really difficult times.
What councils want, aside from a Government who treat them with respect, is fairer funding, to which Labour is absolutely committed. Councils also want help with longer-term funding settlements, as the report makes clear, so that they can plan ahead. Labour is committed to that, too. Thirdly, they want more devolution of power and funding so that they can work with other public services to get the most out of every pound of public funding.
Mr Redwood
Does the hon. Gentleman’s party have plans to devolve the right and the duty to raise more revenue by local government? If so, by which taxes and what powers?
Andy Sawford
I am not surprised that the right hon. Gentleman wants to tempt me down that path. What I am setting out today is a very radical plan for devolution of £30 billion of funding. Of course we recognise that there is a case for fiscal devolution, and we will allow local authorities and combined authorities to retain 100% of business rates. That is a welcome step forward in fiscal devolution, with which the right hon. Gentleman’s party is yet to catch up.
A Labour Government will introduce a proper recognition of needs into the funding formula—we are committed to that. How can it be right for the 10 poorest authorities to be hit hardest, while some authorities such as Wokingham have seen their budgets increase? The right hon. Member for Wokingham (Mr Redwood) will doubtless have different conversations with his local authority, which has benefited from a budget increase, from those of many other hon. Members whose areas have faced huge cuts.
We will take steps to allocate resources much more fairly across local government. Over the medium term, we will give councils greater ability to make long-term plans by introducing multi-year funding settlements. This is supported by local government: we have heard those calls; we support them and we will act. We will devolve power down to local councils and communities—devolving decision making on transport investment and on bus regulation, for example. If those powers are good enough for people in London to exercise at a more local level, they are good enough for the rest of the country.
The public will know that Labour has a strong track-record of devolving power. We passed the Scotland Act 1998 and the Government of Wales Act 2006, and only a future Labour Government will be committed to an English devolution Act that will reverse a century of centralisation. Members have talked about the great early years of some of our cities, which provided pioneering solutions to the problems they faced in the 19th century, but also about how those powers subsequently drifted back to the centre. We intend to reverse that.
Our devolution Act will secure devolution for local communities in England, transferring £30 billion over five years and passing down power and resources for transport, skills, employment support, housing and business support. That is three times as much money as the current Government have said they will devolve in the next Parliament. We will also devolve business rates to city and county regions and combined authorities so that they retain 100% of the additional money that is raised, which constitutes an important fiscal devolution.
The current Government’s talk of devolution relates to limited powers for a small number of larger cities. I agree with those who have called for devolution throughout the country, to all the villages, towns and cities that we represent and that want an opportunity to take more powers and funding so that they can make decisions locally. For all the rhetoric about empowering northern cities, it is worth reminding ourselves that areas such as Liverpool and Manchester—some of the most deprived areas with some of the greatest needs—have faced the biggest cuts in the country. There is nothing empowering or localist about taking with one hand and giving far less back with the other. As was pointed out by my hon. Friend the Member for Wigan, we need to involve people in this devolution, because they currently feel that decisions are made too far away from them. It is important for communities to be involved as we hand over power and resources.
We will join up commissioning between councils and the NHS through health and wellbeing boards to provide “whole person care” by means of a care budget for people with long-term conditions such as disability and frailty. I shall say something about the Manchester proposals in a moment. We will devolve commissioning for employment and skills so that those services are properly joined up. My hon. Friend the Member for Wigan said she felt that the public had been cut out of the conversation in her area, and that consent was needed for this devolution. She was absolutely right. We want to ensure that, as authorities come forward and explain how they will work together to take their new powers and make the most of them, they engage the public in that conversation.
I was extremely disappointed when my local county council announced its intention to explore a partnership with two neighbouring county councils. That did not make much sense to me, but I was more worried by the fact that neither the districts nor the public had been engaged. That is no way in which to build public consent for a radical devolution of power.
We have heard from some Members who represent county areas. I agree with their criticism that the Government have no plan for devolution to counties and county regions. They seem to have a blind spot when it comes to huge areas of the country. If we are given the opportunity to change the position, we will do so. We will offer economic devolution to every part of England.
The Government’s announcement that they will devolve the NHS budget to local authorities in Manchester is particularly topical, and many Members have been exercised about it today. After five years of making savage cuts in council budgets and five years of fragmenting and privatising, the Chancellor of the Exchequer has waited until five weeks before the end of the current Parliament to endorse—in many respects—Labour’s plan to integrate the NHS and social care. Moreover, as we heard from my hon. Friend the Member for Wigan and other Members, he has rushed into it without a proper consultation. The Government are really not doing this in the right way.
A key issue on which Members have commented is motive, which is what makes many of them suspicious. A Government who have, for instance, forced the part-privatisation of ambulance services on people in Greater Manchester are not a Government to be trusted with our NHS, and we question their motive when they make an announcement like this just before an election. Local leaders in Greater Manchester—who have worked with this Government and, in the interests of the people whom they serve, will work with the next—have said that they want an opportunity to develop NHS and social care integration. The leader of Manchester county council, for instance, played a big role in Labour’s local government innovation taskforce, which has championed ideas about the proper integration of health and social care.
The people of Greater Manchester want to be able to get on with the job of developing whole person care. However, before any final deal is signed, important questions about the new arrangements need to be answered. For instance, how much money is on offer, and will it be enough? Members have rightly speculated on the possibility that this is another example of the Government’s devolving the axe by handing over any responsibility for ensuring that a proper NHS and social care service can be provided in an area, and allowing local leaders to take the blame when that service does not meet public expectations.
We must all be vigilant in the face of the danger that the Government are trying to devolve an NHS funding crisis that they have themselves created, not least through their cuts in social care. Labour will offer a better deal. We will offer the NHS and councils more money, raised through our new mansion tax That will allow them to build an NHS that starts in people’s homes, looking after them there and ending the culture of 15-minute care visits. There will be money for the extra nurses, GPs, home care workers and midwives whom we need. Rather than creating new bureaucracies—that is a worrying aspect of the new structure—we will move quickly to devolve more power to councils and councillors.
Democratic accountability is very important, and local leaders must be seen to be in the lead, but we must also think about what additional means of holding people to account may work in different parts of the country. We believe that local public accounts committees could provide a way of including civil society. As other Members have said, we want to engage the public directly, but we can also engage them through civil society organisations.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government (Kris Hopkins)
I welcome the debate and the report, and I share the central tenet of the speech that we heard from the hon. Member for Sheffield South East (Mr Betts). I agree that the role of local government and local leaders must be at the heart of any debate about English devolution.
Many reports have followed the Select Committee’s report. The Government published a Command Paper on the implications of English devolution in December, and we have now published our response to the Committee’s report. One reason for the delay in its publication is the publication of a number of other reports which we thought it appropriate to consider. However, I should have liked our response to be published earlier, and I apologise to members of the Committee for the fact that that was not possible.
I welcome the Committee’s support for the basing of decentralisation and further devolution on existing structures and groups of authorities rather than on a top-down reform of structures. Local areas are best placed to make decisions about joint working and stronger partnership. We will take further steps, which will include encouraging the establishment of combined authorities when they are appropriate.
We have undertaken the biggest ever transfer of powers away from Whitehall through devolution deals, to grow the economy in a balanced way and enable Britain’s cities and communities to be engines for growth. As several Members have pointed out, this is the first Government for a long time to halt the constant move towards centralisation and provide a path back to the empowerment of local people. We have removed centrally imposed regional policy, replacing it with local enterprise partnerships which define their own boundaries and priorities and bring together local business leaders with locally elected leaders. We have given local areas a very substantial share of increases in their local tax base, with areas keeping up to 50% of the increases they deliver in business rates and all council tax plus the new homes bonus, and we have made it clear that we want to go further. The Prime Minister has said a Conservative Government would enable authorities to retain some 66%, and the Secretary of State has said he would like to see 90% retained by 2020.
Mr Redwood
Where health expenditures and money is being offered to local government and local government representatives, what powers will they have to switch money either out of the health budget into the social care budget or out of the social care budget into the health budget?
Kris Hopkins
As I understand it, the accountability for the spend of that money will remain with the NHS and it will be a negotiated position with the local authority. As has been said, the key thing is that the money associated with social services will be driven and directed by local government, but the idea that local authorities, the NHS and the clinical commissioning group come together and shape the services required for their local people is a major step forward. The better care fund has been a path to some of this, but this step itself is fundamental.
I would like to point out some of the things that we have achieved. We have abolished the inspection regime and targets for councils. That regime was extremely costly and imposed huge burdens on local authorities. We have reduced ring-fencing for councils and have created new community rights, giving local people a greater say in shaping their community. We have enabled more decisions about social housing to be taken locally, making the system fairer and more effective, and we have reformed the planning system to cut red tape and interference from central Government, shifting the focus for local authorities to report to their local communities. Through neighbourhood planning, we have helped local people to play a strong role in shaping the areas in which they live and work and in supporting local development proposals.
We have also taken more ambitious steps through growth deals and recent devolution deals further to incentivise local leadership and growth. Some 28 city deals have been negotiated with the largest and fastest-growing cities and their wider functional economic areas outside of London. We should also recognise that 39 local enterprise partnerships will have £12 billion of local growth funding devolved to them over the next five years, with £6 billion having been agreed under the first wave. They are having a direct impact. They are locally led and locally driven, with local people making choices about where the money should be spent—on better roads and public transport, greater support for local businesses to train young people and enhance skills, faster broadband and more homes.