Tag: Government

You Gove to see it?

In the sense that the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about, Michael Gove’s big housing speech had some grains of good news for London and Sadiq Khan.

Sure, there was a slightly formulaic spot of Khan-bashing – the allegation that “the Mayor’s failure on housing, like his failure on crime and his failure on transport, undermines the vitality and attractiveness of our capital.” We are coming up to an election and presenting Khan’s mayoralty as a cautionary example of Labour’s inability to deliver was clearly just too tempting, especially in the wake of the Uxbridge & South Ruislip by-election.

But alternately attacking and ignoring London and its Mayor have been a consistent government theme in recent years. Gove’s predecessor Robert Jenrick took more than a year to agree Khan’s 2020 London Plan, describing his housing delivery as “deeply disappointing”, demanding he water down protections for the Green Belt, open spaces and industrial sites, and allow lower densities and more car parking in suburban locations. And two years ago, in articulating his “levelling up” agenda, London’s previous Mayor, the then Prime Minister Boris Johnson, spoke of the capital only as the engine for an overheated housing market and as a drain on talent in the rest of the country.

So, while Gove may have been stating the obvious when he said making the most of the capital’s potential is “critical to the nation’s success”, the statement was nonetheless welcome. What’s more, the Secretary of State committed to working with the Mayor to “unlock all the potential of London’s urban centre, while preserving the precious low-rise and richly green character of its suburbs such as Barnet and Bromley”.

There’s quite a lot going on there, both lofty principles and low politics. At one level, Gove’s was a classic urban renaissance prescription: focusing new development in highly accessible central locations, where infrastructure such as school places is already present. But there was also electoral calculation. Ever since Johnson ran for Mayor in 2008, pledging to save the suburbs from the encroachment of high-rise apartment buildings, protecting the suburbs – and London’s safest Conservative seats – from new development has been at the heart of Conservative policy.

To unlock potential, Gove proclaimed the launch of “Docklands 2.0”, invoking Michael Heseltine, the patron saint of urban renaissance (who lost the Conservative whip in 2017 as a result of his opposition to Brexit). This “mission of national importance” would see 65,000 homes built in east London’s riverside, from Beckton and Silvertown to Charlton and Thamesmead.

Such plans have a rich heritage as part of the original Heseltine vision for the East Thames Corridor, as the heart of London Thames Gateway, and as the focus for the City East scheme developed by my former colleagues in Mayor Ken Livingstone’s architecture and urbanism unit.

Current London Plan targets already suggest that 65,000 homes are achievable in these “opportunity areas”, but realising that potential has been slow. Many sites lack the infrastructure needed to develop at scale, or need investment in remediation to make them suitable for housing. In that respect, Gove’s commitment to look at the transport investments needed, and to invest government money where it can make a difference, will be welcomed.

There is a catch, though. Gove offered the carrot of working with Khan, but also issued an explicit threat in bellicose terms: “I reserve the right to step in to reshape the London Plan if necessary and consider every tool in our armoury – including development corporations.” It doesn’t sound as if these would be mayoral development corporations, such as those set up by Johnson to oversee the Olympic Park and Old Oak projects, but 1980s-style impositions from Whitehall.

Gove’s political jabs at the Mayor have been reciprocated. Tom Copley, Deputy Mayor for Housing, has defended Khan’s record and described the government’s commitments as “thin gruel”, with funding decisions for vital infrastructure lost in the long grass of Treasury tactics. London Councils housing lead Darren Rodwell, also leader of east London borough Barking & Dagenham, has called for more funding for affordable housing and a permanent relaxation of rules on using Right-to-Buy receipts.

But behind the point-scoring and alongside genuine arguments about resource allocation, the Secretary of State’s speech does seem to mark a dawning awareness that ignoring the UK’s capital when seeking to grow the nation’s economy is a dead end. If Gove can back his vision for Docklands 2.0 with funds and facilitation, and can resist the temptation to take over and micro-manage, he may find himself in an awkward alliance with Khan, even as general and mayoral elections approach.

First published by OnLondon

Levelling up – everything, everywhere, all at once?

On 2 February 2022, the morning the Levelling Up White Paper was launched, the Today Programme’s Nick Robinson was in West Yorkshire. Towards the end of the programme he interviewed Annie Trueman, who was studying music production at Wakefield College, prefacing his interview by saying that many young people wanted to stay in Wakefield but were unable to do so because it lacked a university. I’m not sure he got quite what he wanted.

Did Annie feel she had a future in Wakefield, he asked.

“If I wanted to go into music production, I’d probably move back to Leeds. It’s just a better scene, there’s more places to work.”

Robinson persisted. “What would persuade you that you could make your future in this city, rather than having to get out of it?”

“If there were more studios?” Annie pondered, as if responding to a slow learner. “I could build my own, but then realistically, how many people would come to Wakefield to record their music? They’d be more set to go to Leeds and other bigger cities.”

The exchange has stuck with me throughout the year since – a year in which “levelling up” has been much debated but not much advanced. Without dissing Wakefield – home of The Cribs – a big city like Leeds will always act as a more of a magnet for musical talent. In many ways, the music industry is the epitome of agglomeration economics – the ability of big cities to nurture productive clusters of expertise. Bands learn from each other; they swap musicians and ideas; they support and are supported by an ecosystem of recording studios, gig venues, musical instrument shops and drug dealers.

The discussion also highlighted some of the tensions at the heart of the White Paper. The government knows it wants to reduce “geographical disparities” but is less clear about how these should be defined or how this outcome should be measured. It professes belief in the power of cities as focal points for modern economic growth (proposing a “globally competitive city” in “every area” of the UK by 2030). But it also celebrates a poster in Teesside, offering “Stay local, go far” as its rallying cry, and decries the idea that in many parts of the UK, “if you want to get on you need to get out”. The kid in Hartlepool shouldn’t have to move to Middlesbrough, let alone to Newcastle or London, to pursue their dreams.

Two Prime Ministers later, Michael Gove is back in the Department for Levelling Up Housing and Communities, and “levelling up” has been supplemented by “everywhere” – one of Jeremy Hunts “Four Es”, and every bit as spatially vague as its predecessor. To borrow the title of the Oscar-nominated film, the government really wants levelling up to be Everything, Everywhere, All At Once.

I’m not sure this destructive ambiguity is sustainable or helps the government. The rows over the distribution of Levelling Up Fund money are a case in point. It is to be spread round the country because “everywhere” needs “levelling up”, and then the allocations are criticised for being awarded to a run-down garrison town in the Prime Minister’s (generally affluent) constituency, rather than spent on inner city projects in Birmingham. The government is stuck between economic and electoral logic – damned if they focus funding in a few places where it can really make a difference, and damned if they spread it more widely.

There is a way through this, but it requires a level of political courage the government has yet to show. The approach should be to say that the UK’s larger cities, including London, are the heart of the economy and will continue to be so. Towns and smaller cities can benefit from proximity, from commuting, from home-working and supply chains, but existing cities will form the foundations of future growth. Government will need to invest directly and swiftly in some significant new projects – such as Northern Powerhouse Rail – but should otherwise stand back, supporting city leaders in raising funds to build the infrastructure they need, just as they supported London in raising funds to build the Elizabeth Line and North London Line extension.

Pursuing these policies would not be obviously in the government’s short-term electoral interests. But their chances of winning the next general election look slim in any case, and a revitalised 21st Century Conservatism cannot be founded only on the rural villages and declining industrial towns of the 20th. Refocusing “levelling up” on the UK’s cities may not only be the right thing to do politically. It could even sow the seeds of an urban revival for a party that was once as comfortable and successful in the inner cities as in their suburban and rural hinterlands.

First published by OnLondon.

On the bold and the dutiful

I don’t find myself naturally warming to Dominic Cummings. Our politics are different, I’m suspicious of some of his tactics, and I find his airy dismissal of ‘London liberals’ every bit as glib and patronising as the elite attitudes he is so keen to denounce.

Since the beginning of the year, Cummings’ call out for ‘super-talented weirdos’ to work with him at the heart of government has provided a focal point for his many detractors (alongside the affectedly casual dress sense – the Steve Hilton de nos jours). The language is geeky and alienating; it flies in the face of proper recruitment practice; it betrays an over-familiarity with game theory and cyberpunk fiction, and an under-acquaintance with the realities of public administration.

All true up to a point (though the blog’s language is no more obscure than the half-digested formulas of regular HR-speak – “socialising key metrics with wider stakeholders to drive outcomes” etc). But behind the buzz-words, you can detect the anxiety faced by any reforming administration: how on earth can the machinery of government deliver radical change?

The caution and conservatism of the civil service is canonical. In episode after episode of ‘Yes Minister’, Minister Jim Hacker comes up with a seeming common-sense proposal, only to be talked out of it (“a very boldproposal, Minister”) by Sir Humphrey, permanent secretary and inertia incarnate. Yes Minister was broadcast forty years ago, but still resonates with anyone who works with or in government, despite endless civil service modernisation, change and transformation programmes.

My first encounter with ‘Yes Minister Live’ was a memo (or ‘minute’ to use the Whitehall terminology) that I found when setting up the Greater London Authority. It referred to one of Notting Hill Carnival’s periodic financial crises, and wondered whether there as a case for government intervention. A handwritten note by a senior civil servant concluded: “I think we should re-assure ourselves there is nothing we can do.”

A few years later, preparing for the London Olympics, I moved from the GLA, where the lawyers and finance teams did their best to find a way of legally doing what the mayor wanted to do, to a government department, which seemed beset by other departments – in particular the Treasury and the Treasury Solicitors (government legal service) – trying to make it difficult to do what the Cabinet had agreed and the Prime Minister had announced.

Part of this is cultural: few in Whitehall ever lost their job for doing nothing. But I don’t think it is good enough simply to demand culture change in the civil service. Nobody was acting irrationally, but in accordance with long-established principles about how public spending is agreed, monitored and reported – and how politics is performed. Any ministerial tendency to innovation quickly wilts when faced with a request for formal directions from civil servants or the rough music of a Public Accounts Committee hearing.

In any case, for all the enthusiastic praise of ‘disruption’, mantras like Facebook’s “move fast and break things” feel a bit off when applied to public services, given that the ‘things’ that might be broken are people’s lives, rather than clever widgets for a search engine. In public administration, there is an understandably greater tolerance for poor performance that can be corrected over time than there is for the risk of dramatic failure that requires a fresh start.

But, all that said, we do need policy-making and -delivery that is better informed, more agile, more capable of experimentation and adaptation. This requires internal changes in Whitehall, and fresh people thinking fresh ideas, but they will run into the sand without a transformation in the operating environment provided by Westminster and the media.

Ministers should feel as comfortable admitting the failures of policy initiatives as they are spinning (often dubious) successes. They should acknowledge complexity rather than signal-boosting simple solutions. Parliamentarians and press commentators should step aside from ‘gotcha’ denunciations to respect such honest admissions and discussions.

Yeah, and pigs should fly. It is hard to see any of this happening in such a febrile and fractious environment. But we need change if we are to re-tool government for the challenges of this decade, or even this century. Perhaps this Government, and this Prime Minister, with the security provided by their majority, could take the first steps in the way they talk about, implement and evaluate policy. Issues like post-Brexit trade, social care, climate change, and regional economic policy require innovation, agility and honesty, rather than the staleness, inertia and bad faith that dominate today.