David Ottewell's Politics

A bit of light relief. I’ve been pointed towards this story in the Lancashire Evening Post.
It suggests moving the museum from Deepdale to Urbis ‘would put some of the game’s priceless relics at risk, it has been claimed’.
The ‘has been claimed’ is significant. Claimed by whom?
The answer is Ann Stewart – head of paper, painting and frames conservation at the National Conservation Centre in Liverpool.
Apparently she is concerned that Urbis is made up of 2,200 glass panes and doesn’t have protection against UV rays.
“Certainly if it’s all glass and not UV protected, there would be a risk of discolouration and yellowing of the paper,” she says.
This is terrible. Can anything be done to avoid this catastrophe?
The story continues:

She said there could be ways to tackle the problems such as placing programmes in cases…

Fantastic. So Urbis could ruin priceless programmes unless they were displayed in cases. Not exactly the plot of Armageddon, eh?

So the cost of moving the National Football Museum to Urbis would be £8m – a very large sum of money in local government terms. Even Cristiano Ronaldo would have to work for 10 months to pay off the bill.
Manchester city council says the majority of this cash would come from third-party sources. My understanding is that £5m has been lined up from the North West Development Agency. That creates political problems of its own.
Preston – the current home of the museum – is, after all, in the north west, too. And they would argue that the museum is more important to their economic development than it would be to Manchester’s. Thus, the logic runs, if the NWDA is to carry out its remit it should simply bung them the £5m.
Sounds reasonable? Well, to a point. But the NWDA isn’t the driving force in the move. It was the museum’s trustees that first approached Manchester city council. They simply can’t see, in the long term, how Preston can offer the same potential for visitors and profile as Manchester. The NWDA has a supporting role in this cast.
The agency is playing its cards close to its chest – pointing out publicly that no money has yet been allocated to the museum move. They could, of course, sit back and wait for the trustees to decide – making it know privately that they are willing to provide £5m towards supporting the football museum, no matter where it ends up. Odds are Manchester would still win.
The fact is, this move has been discussed for some time. Preston is rallying the troops at the 11th hour – but only since news of the switch to Urbis became public. It is a fight they have to fight loudly, for poltical reasons, but one they privately accepted had been largely lost before we broke the news earlier this month.
Positions can still change – a good old-fashioned public outcry will never be ignored – but the economic facts will remain the same. Manchester would offer a more sustainable home to the museum in the long term. Preston will not be able to match the £2m a year subsidy that already goes to Urbis, and would continue. It will not be able to match the profile that the building and the city would deliver.

It’s fair to say that Graham Stringer is no great fan of the North West Development Agency.
But in a fresh – blistering – attack, the Manchester Blackley MP has not only ripped into the NWDA, but into his own government’s rationale for its existence.
“The government,” he said, “are still wedded to the idea of regional government, which the people in the north east threw out completely.
“I do not understand why the government are still wedded to the non-democratic and inefficient part of that process, when the electorate – in a part of the country that was chosen because it was most likely to support regional government – threw it out.”
Mr Stringer then went on to talk about a statement made by Robert Hough – the new chairman of the NWDA, and a man the MP referred to as ‘a friend’.
“He [Mr Hough] has done excellent work on the Commonwealth Games in Manchester and I was a colleague of his on the Manchester ship canal,” said Mr Stringer. “As a capitalist, he has put a great deal of effort into the community.
“On his appointment to the board, he said: ‘We have to be the referee between local government and central government.’
“That is completely silly.
“He is an excellent man, but I think he was looking for justification for a job and position that have no justification. People who are elected do not need someone to referee between them and government.”
Mr Stringer then went on to claim the NWDA had produced policies that were ‘economically indefensible’.
He continued: “Rather than putting money where it is most likely to generate most jobs – the economic hub of the north west is Manchester, the second economic hub is Liverpool and the third is probably Preston and Chester – the greatest amount of money per head of population has gone to Cumbria.
“There is another justification for spending money, and that is the relief of poverty, but that has not been the justification that has been given.”

Not everyone is happy about Greater Manchester being designated a ‘city-region’ by the government – with new powers to set priorities and spend cash.
To many it sounds the death-knell for so-called ‘regionalism’ – the division of England into adminstrative fictions like the ‘north west’, instead of more natural geographic or economic entities.
Not that the regions will simply disappear. If nothing else, they are more-or-less required to exist by Europe for the purpose of funding, regulation and elections. But the notion that the regions could be bolstered into something more real seems to have disappeared.
No one wanted beefed-up regional assemblies when John Prescott tried to bulldoze them through. The weaker, indirectly-elected assemblies they would have replaced have also withered away.
Then there is the North West Development Agency, which has channelled billions of pounds into the regional economy. The NWDA is a tricky one – not least because it is generally extremely well regarded. The Tories plan to hand their funds direct to councils. Even under Labour, the NWDA’s role must inevitably be diminished by the ‘city-region’ pilot.
The problem is that what is good for Greater Manchester is not necessarily good for the rest of the north west – like Merseyside, Cumbria, Blackpool and Preston.
Len Collinson, a 75-year-old multi-millionaire and former Trotskyist, is currently leader of Private-Sector Partners (PSP).
PSP represents 100,000 firms across the north west. It claims the city-region pilot ‘risks undermining 10 years of hard work on the north west region’s economy’.
“Allowing local authorities this amount of power and additional funding raises a number of serious concerns,” says Len. “It tramples over the work done over several years by the NWDA.
“The NWDA has become more effective in balancing the needs of the whole region. Its work, and its long-term strategies, will be disrupted and undermined by an additional body of this kind.
“Second, I am concerned about the diversion of funds away from agreed regional priorities and into Greater Manchester. The NWDA is a better judge of how this money should be distributed to create a prosperous and fair society. Manchester city benefits from its surroundings, including Cheshire, Lancashire, Merseyside and South Lakes.”
I think it is clearly true that Greater Manchester benefits its relationship with other parts of the region. (Just look at the number of wealthy businessmen, football players, etc., who live in and around Alderley Edge.) But should that be reflected in policy? Should Manchester lose out to subsidise other parts of the region?
Look at London. London benefits from surrounding areas, too. But not as much as those surrounding areas benefit from London. That is despite the fact London has its own assembly, with a large number of devolved powers.
No one is saying that Greater Manchester should be given money that is due to other parts of the north west. The claim is that it should be allowed to spend its own share, as it sees fit. That is more likely to result in a successful Greater Manchester – and a successful Greater Manchester is in the interests of every person, and business, in the north west.

I’ve been having a closer look at the full Budget report. The total sum due to be raised by the 50pc tax rate over two years is £2.94bn. That’s actually less than the increase in fuel duty (£3bn).
The big short-term costs are the increase in capital allowances for business (£1.64bn in 2009-10), the deferral of business rates payments (£700m in 2009-10), extra employment funding for the DWP (£590m in 2009-10), and age-related payments to pensioner households (£600m). Some of the high-profile measures sprinkled on the Budget to give it a bit more glitter – such as the ‘car-scrappage’ bonuses – will cost the Treasury much less (£300m, in fact).
Can’t find anything in it for charities other than a £20m hardship fund. So the Christie appears to have missed out on reclaiming all or part of the £6.5m it ‘lost’ in the Icelandic bank crash.
On the city-region pilots, it’s worth reading what the Budget report says carefully:
The Government will work with the pilots to develop proposals for new strategy-setting powers over adult skills funding, expected to be in place within three to six months, new joint investment boards with RDAs, the Home and Communities Agency (HCA) and other partners to coordinate and align investment and pilot new employment programmes.
The Government is also interested in developing new opportunities for innovative financing mechanisms to support locally driven investment in growth and regeneration. The Government will work with interested local authorities and city-regions to assess the scope for accelerating development by allowing investment in infrastructure to be financed from the increased property tax base that could be enabled by the existence of improved infrastructure. As part of this, the Government will explore with local authorities the potential benefits, costs and feasibility of piloting such an approach. In the 2009 Pre-Budget Report, the Government will report on this analysis and the options for taking it forward.
More on this later. The second part is intriguing – and isn’t limited to the city-region pilots. Given the timescale, though, whether this government ever gets a chance to take it forward seems increasingly unlikely.

I’m reliably informed that the Budget will include plans to make Greater Manchester – along with Leeds – a pioneering ‘city-region’.
The proposals would see leaders of our region’s 10 councils, along with local employers, take a major role in setting the agenda in terms of what skills the adult population needs, and how they can get them.
Negotiations would continue over the transfer of additional powers and funds. Crucially, they would take place on a short time-scale – and be finished by the summer.
I’ve long argued that this sort of devolution is necessary, and long overdue. Both Westminster, and bodies like the North West Development Agency, are too remote to understand properly the needs of the Greater Manchester economy.
The NWDA, moreover, is not elected, and has to balance the needs of big cities against the demands of more rural areas, like Cumbria.
Left to its own devices, Greater Manchester has the potential to provide a vital counter-balance to the overwhelming economic importance of London to Britain. It will never be a rival to the capital; but it can be a complement.
Local council leaders have been worried for a while that the government was not serious about city-regional devolution. My sense is they will be much happier come Wednesday.

What s it with the Conservatives and the North West Development Agency?
One minute Eric Pickles is pledging to take “an axe” to “Labour’s quangocracy”, and saying the RDAs “don’t have a rosy future”.
The next David Cameron is tell MEN readers that it is the people of the north west that we will decide if we keep our own RDA – and saying, in his opinion, people here wouldn’t want to scrap it.
Now we have Tobias Ellwood, a shadow minister, saying that the NWDA is “the best” of the “RDAs” he has visited.
“If the approach of the NWDA were replicated throughout the country, we would have a much better system, and I would be less critical in speaking about it,” he said.
Mr Ellwood went on to make a specific point that, I think, is well made. The north west doesn’t market itself as the north west; it markets itself as Manchester, the Lake District, Liverpool, Blackpool, and so forth. These are well-recognised names throughout the country, the continent, even the world.
Nonetheless, the Tories need to be clear about their position. “The people will decide” is a reasonable policy; but don’t, then, pledge to take an axe to quangocracy. Pledge to take an axe to bad quangocracy.

I was speaking to regional minister Bev Hughes this evening. She was outlining her plans to help families and small businesses in the north west. These included redirecting European money and asking the regional development agency to “reprioritise” budgets.
Then she said something tantalising: “We might also look at whether there are major infrastructure projects we can bring forward, and which might help.”
I asked if she had anything specific in mind, and she said no.
But still… watch this space.

Experienced government-watchers will have noticed that fine words about devolving power in England are not always matched by deeds.
Many people who campaigned for a “yes” vote in the regional-assembly-referendum-that-never-was still think they could have won – if ministers’ had been prepared to put real powers on the table.
John Prescott, who spearheaded the ill-fated campaign, said regional assemblies would be “a new form of government that will bring choice, democracy and opportunity to their region”. The public sniffed out pretty quickly that that was not the case. The proposed assembly for the north west – a region bigger than Scotland – would have had no real power over key issues like transport and education. It was less a new form of government and more a new tier of democracy.
Wind the clock forward, and the talk now is of devolution to city-regions like Greater Manchester. Council leaders here were genuinely struck by the apparent enthusiasm of the then local government chief, David Miliband, to hand over power.
The government published a document called the Sub National Review last summer. It wasn’t exactly revolutionary, but it did contain some recommendations that would represent genuine devolution. In particular it talked of the unelected regional development agencies – which control virtually all the spending on economic development outside London – delegating funding “wherever possible”.
Well, the government is consulting again. And guess what? The wording has been altered. The development agencies are now being recommended to delegate funding “where appropriate”.
A small change, you might think. But isn’t it funny how the pattern is always the same? English devolution is talked up – and then, when the time for the letting go draws near, watered down again.

It is almost unfashionable to talk about “regions” these days. Nowadays, the buzz word is “city regions” – natural social and geographic entities like Greater Manchester, rather than the amorphous (and entirely made-up) “north west”.
It’s certainly true that regional devolution is dead; the north east didn’t want it, and all the signs are, neither did we. There are various moves afoot to strengthen Greater Manchester’s hand, in terms of the money it has to spend and the powers it has to spent it.
But while these appear to have government support, ministers remain committed to the regional structure, too. The role of the regions is being beefed up, not stripped down – most significantly, through the Regional Spatial Strategies (RSS).
The north west’s RSS has just been republished in a new draft after a number of government-ordered revisions. Make no mistake, this innocuous-sounding document will be vitally important to your future. It will decide what gets built and where, and it will help control how billions of pounds of development cash get spent. It will also be legally binding on councils.
For example, it sets housing targets, which currently look like this:

Manchester council have had two issues with the RSS in previous forms. The first concerned the supercasino – the RSS went for Blackpool, and still does:


Clearly that’s irrelevant now the project has been scrapped.
The second was that the RSS tried to be all things to all people. It spoke of the different strengths of different parts of the north west. It didn’t, Manchester said, accept and build on the fact that Greater Manchester drives the region’s economy, and should be prioritised accordingly.
Currently the RSS says this:
As a major centre for economic activity, the Manchester City Region contributes almost half of the North West’s total Gross Value Added (GVA) and offers the greatest potential for boosting its overall economic performance. Accordingly it is the focus of a significant proportion of the future development activity outlined in RSS within the North West’s three city regions.
It also nails Manchester’s economy flag firmly to the “knowledge economy” mast. That accords entirely with the council’s thinking. Manufacturing products is dead; manufacturing ideas and skills is the future. The university and the surrounding area will be crucial in this regard.
What, though, of the people, and where they will live? There have long been concerns that Manchester’s city centre simply isn’t big enough to stand many more flats and apartments. Every residential building that goes up deprives business of much-needed space. And yet, just miles away in the inner city areas, we have sky-high vacancy rates and massive programmes of clear-and-rebuild.
The RSS is clear that:
residential development should be focussed in the inner areas adjacent to the regional centre
and that:
residential developments in the regional centre need to meet a range of needs, types and tenures and should not compromise the vitality and viability of the commercial, retail, leisure, cultural and tourism functions of the regional centre, or dominate any particular part of the area.
It also contains a specific warning:
The inner areas have enormous potential, which, if left untapped, will limit the ability of the regional centre to secure investment and generate further growth. Development within the inner areas will boost overall economic growth in the city region, reduce local inequalities and deprivation and provide a clear alternative to further decentralisation and the unsustainable commuting patterns associated with it.
This is, in my view, entirely correct. If Manchester is to continue to grow economically, it must grow physically – and simple geography dictates that that means developing the inner city areas. We need people living near (but not in) the city centre and commuting on public transport if we want to free up road space for inter-city traffic. And we need huge investment to be targeted at our inner cities if we don’t want to people who already live there – and who, in massive numbers, lack the skills for the new economy – to get left behind.
The greatest threat to Manchester’s economic success isn’t London, or Birmingham, or Leeds, or Liverpool. It isn’t inflation, interest rates, or the global credit crunch. The greatest threat to Manchester’s economic success is Manchester itself.