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Decentralisation

My Lords, I am delighted to be able to make my maiden speech in a debate that goes to the heart of the health of local democracy and to the heart of the debate about trust and politicians. At the outset, I have a confession to make. In 1975, together with everyone else who attended the Labour Party conference of that year, I voted to abolish your Lordships’ House. On that occasion, we were all gently chided by one of my mentors, Lord Shinwell, who reminded us that he had voted to abolish your Lordships’ House in 1929. After a very long and very distinguished career in another place, he said, ““I had nowhere else to go””. I leave it to your Lordships to judge whether I have nowhere else to go, but if that is the case I can think of no better place to go. I used to chide my younger colleagues in the other place that they were not proper politicians if they could not speak for 10 minutes without engaging the brain. Again, I leave your Lordships to judge whether on this occasion I have taken my own advice. I came into politics 33 years ago, the son of a shipyard worker in Sunderland, who had been unemployed for seven years during the 1930s. It is not surprising that I had one or two small matters on my agenda when I entered politics, such as abolishing poverty, abolishing unemployment and abolishing educational inequality. My commitment to those objectives has remained firm over all those years and my noble friends on the Front Bench espouse those objectives too. Over the years some progress has been made. I had another objective, which was to prevent too much power ending up in too few hands. Perhaps it was the nonconformity that I learnt at my mother’s knee. I leave your Lordships to speculate how someone who was a nonconformist to his finger tips ended up as the agent of conformity for 10 years in the other place. How that happened I cannot tell. Because of that nonconformity or for some other reason, I have always been a decentraliser and a devolver, both by instinct and by experience. Perhaps I may be allowed to refer to my former constituency, the town of Bishop Auckland, by way of example. Perhaps the only thing for which Bishop Auckland is known throughout the world is its superb amateur football club. In the 1950s and 1960s the team regularly ended up in the final at Wembley playing in front of 100,000 people. The people of Bishop Auckland are rightly proud of that great football heritage. They are also proud of the fact that the town has been the home of the bishops of Durham for 800 years. A few miles down the road is Shildon. In 1825, slightly before my time, Timothy Hackworth began to build rail rolling stock in the town of Shildon. The building of that rolling stock went on until 1983, sometimes employing 2,600 people. The people of Shildon tend to celebrate their railway heritage now because of the efforts of Shildon Borough Council and the National Rail Museum at York where they have Locomotion, a rail museum with 60 rolling stock, which has attracted approaching 150,000 visitors in the short nine months since it opened. A few miles in another direction, in Spennymoor, people are immensely proud of their mining heritage. I will be marching behind the Spennymoor town band at the miners’ gala as I have done every year for the past 15 or 20 years. The gala is a great celebration of mining. It is such a moving occasion, when you watch 30 bands coming over Elvet Bridge with banners flying and stopping in front of the hotel in the centre of Durham. All of those are sources of immense pride in my communities but I am even more proud of the miners’ settlements in Spennymoor because they have nurtured many painters among former miners who are of regional significance—and two who are of national significance; Tom McGuinness, who worked for 50 years in the mines in Bishop Auckland, and Norman Cornish, who was also a miner in Spennymoor. I have only Teesdale left to mention out of my former constituency—almost 600 square miles of the most glorious countryside in the whole of the north of England. Barnard Castle boasts the national gem of the Bowes Museum under its very able young director, Adrian Jenkins, which is chaired most ably by the noble Viscount, Lord Eccles, who I am glad to see is in his place. If we are to regenerate further these communities we can only do so by building on their already established sense of civic pride in their history. That cannot be done by central government from the top. Of course, there has to be a strong strategic centre. If we had nothing but centralisation, I fear that we would end up with chaos. We need a strong strategic centre voting on policies and allocating the money to allow interesting things to happen at local level. However, we can regenerate communities only by releasing the skill, commitment and creativity of local people. Local government, as well as national government, can be centralising. Our message ought to be directed at both central and local government. No regeneration of communities can take place without engaging the skill and creativity of local people. We are not only talking about the health of local democracy this morning; the matter goes to the reform of the public service. We have tested to destruction the view that you can micromanage the health service from the centre. We have learnt that you have to release the skill and creativity of people at the sharp end. We have all learnt that, but I am not certain that we have learnt the mechanisms by which it can happen. Perhaps that is because there are echelons of managers who have been brought up in the command-and-control culture and find it difficult to learn that managing these days, both in business and in public service, is a matter of releasing the skill and creativity of the workforce. I look forward to the Government pursuing that agenda with even greater vigour. I am very pleased to have been allowed to make a small contribution to this debate, and I hope that other opportunities occur.