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Greater Manchester Combined Authority Order 2011

My Lords, I should first declare a number of interests in this matter. I am leader of one of the 10 Greater Manchester authorities and chairman of the AGMA executive board. Last month, I was appointed chair of the shadow combined authority, because we anticipate the success of the order. We are well into planning for it. I thank the Minister for the clear and thorough way in which he introduced the order and through him thank the Government for the way in which they reviewed the application for the combined authority for Greater Manchester and for agreeing to it. There are some familiar faces here. We were in this very Room discussing the Committee stage of the wonderful Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Bill. That lasted a long time and, in one session, I rather surprised the Minister at the time by saying that, if you want this sort of thing to work, you have to give it some real teeth and real powers; otherwise, what is the point of going through all these processes? Fortunately, the Minister listened and, as a result, the combined authority is a more effective and more accountable form of government. As the Minister described, with wonderful timing we entered the consultation phase in March last year, which of course straddled the general election. Therefore, there was an impasse before the election but, as I said, we were extremely pleased that the Government listened, and there was overwhelming support for the combined authority from partners in Greater Manchester. The authority shares with the Government the desire to improve the economy of Greater Manchester, and it does so in a number of innovative ways, particularly working with the private sector. We have no quarrels with that. We have a long history in Manchester of working with the private sector. We recently set up the Business Leadership Council, which is a fairly free-flying body. It can criticise AGMA if it does not think that it is responding to the needs of business across the conurbation. As the Minister said, we have now been working together in AGMA since the abolition of the old met counties in 1986. That means that we have been working together for 25 years. I think that we have become more effective because we have realised that there is more to do. The tyranny of some local boundaries means that, when trying to achieve something locally, you need to think bigger, particularly on economic matters. With the support of the previous Government, there was an independent economic review for Manchester. A group of distinguished economists was able to come and say what was good about the Greater Manchester economy and, perhaps more importantly for all of us, what was not good and what we needed to do. One thing that the economists said we needed to do was to improve the governance, making it stronger, and integrate decisions on transport with other economic decisions. That is what the combined authority will allow us to do. I want to comment on one thing that the Minister said which was not quite correct. In the wake of a very painful experience concerning the congestion charge, in which a referendum was broken, AGMA agreed to set up a Greater Manchester transport fund. It increased the levy from each local authority by 3 per cent above the demands of the service and put it into a transport fund, which was able to pay for the extensions to Metrolink, as the Minister evidenced. Therefore, although it went through the CA, the CA did not pay for it; the AGMA leaders agreed to do that. That is the kind of thing that we will do in the future. Despite the current pressures on local government, we are sustaining that going forward. We also want to work with the Government on reforming public services, as the Minister said. In particular, we are a pilot for community budgets. We understand the need for work to be done regarding families with complex needs and the great costs that arise for local authorities and government. Often, we just manage a problem; we do not cure it. Therefore, we hope that we will be able to do better work on that. The Minister is absolutely right: we have no intention of setting up a bureaucracy to run the combined authority. We see it as a way of saving in the long term by combining work. A lot of work is going from local authorities’ highways services into the new combined authority, and that will produce savings across the board, apart from the general work that we are doing in that regard. Finally, again, I thank the Government for their foresight. We believe that we can work together with the Government and achieve a lot on this matter.