UoS_Henri Murison talk

It’s absolute pleasure to be here this evening, um, for a whole variety of different events, but particularly to welcome Henry who’s gonna be, uh, talking to us, but also to launch the Center for the South. So I’m Professor Jane Falkingham and I am a very strange title. I’m Vice President Engagement and International.

It used to be international engagement, but just to show the commitment of the university to the civic agenda. My title flipped in in January, and I have the honor of holding, uh, the civic strategy for the university. And I’m really delighted that in March of this year,

We signed the Civic University agreement with, uh, five local authorities that we work most closely with. And of course, we’re looking to then extend that out to sign that, sign up the Civic University agreement with others, others as well. Um, but we are deeply committed to being the University of

Southampton and working for the city of Southampton and the region in which we are, are located, and of course for the nation in which we’re located, and the world in which we’re located, which is why the international bit comes in as well.

But our civic university strategy is based on four pillars and those four pillars are people, place, partnership and impact. And in order to deliver on all of those, we, um, we are delighted to be launching the Center for the South today.

So I’m gonna hand over to Diana who’s going to tell you, uh, a little bit more about the Center for the South and, and the work that we’re going to be doing. So Diana, thank you. Thank You, Jane. Thank you. Thank you.

It’s really good to be here today and to see so many familiar faces that we’ve worked with over the years and to talk about the exciting new work that’s going on with Center for the South. So Center for the South is very much aligned with our civic agenda as Jane has

Been outlining here at the university and thinking about how we can best serve the communities we work within. But we’re also looking at how we can support people in terms of developing new and exciting place-based policy. So what we’re doing is thinking of how we can work collaboratively across

Different groups. So working with the private sector, the public sector, the local authorities, um, the civic agenda, the civic, the different civic organizations as well. So what we’re doing is very much focused on how we can bring these groups together to think meaningfully about how we do local policy that works well for

Our communities and make sure that we’re addressing all the different needs we’ve got. Part of what we’re going to going to be doing is funding some different, different exciting new projects around the new things fund. So the new things fund’s going to be announced very shortly. The winners of that are already,

We’re in touch with ’em very quickly and we’re going to be focusing on the different agendas which we’ve identified with our different colleagues around mental health and health inequalities, net Zero and skilling up our organizations locally and the different people who work in our communities.

So it’s very much bringing together all these different groups to think how we can develop policy that works for each of us to help support us in the central south, become a really prosperous region. So I’m gonna hand over to John now who’s going to be chairing the session

Tonight. And as you can see, we’ve got our new website here for Center for the South. So keep an eye on it and we’ll be happy to share new things as they develop. Great. Thanks very much Dana. And thanks very much Jane for, um,

The introductions and, and thanks very much Trevor for coming out, um, on a cold wet, uh, well not that wet anymore, uh, November night. So I am, my name’s John Boswell. I’m professor of Politics and Public policy and also along with, uh,

Diana and Giles, a co-director of the New Center for the South, which we’re very excited about. Um, I am gonna be chairing, I’ve got a few housekeeping things that I’m required to go through. So, uh, apologies in advance. Uh, we’re not expecting a fire alarm,

So if the fire alarm goes off, uh, you’ll have to follow, uh, go outside and follow the fire exits. Uh, we had to assemble in Salisbury Road outside. Um, hopefully that won’t happen. Um, another thing, so I can see a lot of, a few people here are, are staff,

But a number of external, the doors to this building are going to lock at six o’clock and you’ll be trapped inside unless you have, are escorted by a staff member. So if you do need to leave, make meaningful eye contact with Hannah or Pooja, um,

And they will help you get outta the building so you’re not stuck here forever. Um, the another thing to know is that we are filming, so, um, we’re gonna have Henry’s gonna talk for 20 to 30 minutes, something like that.

Uh, then we’re gonna open it up for Q and A. Uh, so just be aware, uh, we’ll have roving mics, you know, you’ll be on camera, so if you don’t want to be on camera, let us know. Um, and if you, obviously if you don’t want a question to be on camera, uh,

We’ll find another way of getting that to Henry rather than on the film. Um, and I think that’s it. Um, so yeah, now it’s up to, to me to introduce our guest of honor. So thank you very much Henry for making it all the way down. Uh,

I think as far as you can make it just about, as you said, uh, in the UK without having to get on a plane or a ferry. Uh, Henry Murison is the chief executive of the Northern Powerhouse Partnership, which, uh, I dunno how familiar you are with it in the room,

But is a, uh, you know, a major investment in the north, northern regions of England to bring together, uh, innovation expertise and to drive the economy forward and bridge some of the gaps between the north and south, uh, economically. Um,

And so his extensive experience there that we can draw on and think about if we’re thinking, you know, how can we apply some of these lessons, uh, when thinking about how we can have a southern powerhouse here, uh, in around Southampton. So really, really delighted to have Henry here to, to talk, um,

As I say about 20 or 30 minutes and then we’ll open it up for q and a. Thanks very much. Thank you. And thank you so much for the invitation. And um, I suppose it, it’s really interesting for me to come here, uh,

’cause I’m not the first Northerner to come to Southampton in the last few years, uh, to talk about devolution and the journey you’ve been going on because this has been a very torturous journey. Uh, and so when I was reading, uh, John Denham in the room, very kindly, uh,

Did me a potted history of the bits I didn’t and some, and some I did already know a lot of it I didn’t know, particularly the more recent part of the story about how A devolution project, which was really kind of cooked up in greater Manchester,

Has not necessarily worked quite how we would’ve intended in other places, right? And that’s the unforeseen consequences, right? So we are the most centralized, uh, country in the western world. Uh, we also have the greatest geographical regional inequalities of anywhere in the world, uh, of developed world. Um, so go figure.

There’s definitely a relationship between those two things. And there’s a kind of a political and there’s an economic story and I’d like to talk about both, but not about the north in its isolation, but about what I think it sort of means for the rest of England.

Because if you’re interested in devolution in England, the northern story does dominate, right? And that’s not entirely healthy. Um, but that’s the, the challenge about the British political system that the government of the current day is not the government that started this.

It was the Cameron Osborne coalition and then Cameron Osborne without the coalition. Um, and they conceived of the, the devolution project as part of that northern powerhouse vision around economic regeneration. So although devolution was offered to other people,

It was explicitly sort of a kind of a kind of almost a northern special that could be available to others. And that sort of made it hard for others necessarily to make it work. ’cause it was really designed with us in the north of England in mind and over

Time, uh, and levelling up is explicitly not as geographically um, tied. But intellectually it’s probably more troublesome because it starts on the premise that it’s about addressing a deficit and that somehow we to take things from people in England who have lots and give it to other people.

Now the reality of power influence, uh, autonomy over your own economy and place is that no one in England outside London has very much of it at all. Even those people with devolution. So the concept that there’s a need to address some sort of defining inequality,

There are inequalities between people and between communities. But if you look at the structures of England, they are all fundamentally broken everywhere. And so one of the big kind of misnomers of the levelling up debate, and I think why it’s now disappeared and probably won’t come back in that form

In a way that the northern powerhouse never is no longer government policies. I mean the king wasn’t saying that word the way his mother was almost 10 years ago or being made to say it. ’cause that’s how it works. The,

The reality of the kind of how we got here is that the northern powerhouse started as an idea that London and by extension the wider south, but that isn’t the same. And we know it’s not the same. Obviously the media like to conflate the two that this part of the world

And London specifically did not have to suffer for the north to do better because that’s not how any other advanced economy works. I mean there are lots of global cities in the world like London that actually perform vaguely similarly, Paris, New York, if you compare them in productivity terms to London, they’re different,

But they’re broadly equivalent. I mean then there’s no, they’ve different types of industrial base. They have different types of focus, but they’re largely, uh, economically similar and they are different to their neighbouring regions. But the gap between London and the rest in this country is so high,

So difficult to address because it’s gone on for so long. And even France, right, which is the country of my mother’s birth, where she still spends a lot of time, they have the most centralised, uh, governance system in the western world too. It is almost as bad as ours.

And they address that over the last 20, 30, 40 years. And they have done lots of things to invest in local infrastructure and address, particularly transport, which is largely the north problem. And it is because of their political structures that they were able to do that, not because they somehow had better engineers.

So the challenge isn’t that anyone malign tries not to address these problems. It’s that when a labor government tried to give money to northern cities to build things, it was only really greater Manchester that already had a kind of shadow combined authority. A thing called AGMA, the Association of Greater Manchester Authorities,

Which basically was the club of councils that used to have a county council. And when they were all split up, sort of refused to stop working together despite the fact the government had broken them up, they still had their transport system, they kept that and they built on it to do other things.

Well they had been building tram lines for years and so it’s very easy for a labor government to write checks to ….. the Manchester City Council. That was sort of the defacto lead. The transport body was quite strong and well organized.

Whereas when they tried to give money to Leeds to build a tram, LEEDS tried to build a tram just within the city of Leeds. Despite the fact that the travel to work of Leeds extends to where I live in Bradford extends to loads of places in West Yorkshire.

And so it was the political structures, not necessarily anything else that made it very hard to deliver change that was necessary. And the economic legacy of Leeds not having a mass transit system is massive in terms of its ability to grow and attract people.

And Manchester’s relative success to West Yorkshire has been because of political structures, not just because there’s anything inherently better about Manchester. Yes, it has better football teams has a slightly easier geographic alignment in terms of west commuter towns are compared to West Yorkshire. But West Yorkshire,

The lead city regions, it was called in the early days, the Cameron government ’cause it is a bigger region than just the kind of old county council footprint is significantly bigger. Economies the second biggest economy in England after London. But its success has been nowhere near in productivity terms in the last 15

Years. It’s kept pace with London. Greater Manchester has closed the gap in the last 15 years. And it’s because of political structures and because what those allow you to do to address economic challenges. Because there are things, the market, there are things, the private sector alone,

Even if it knows they need doing cannot do. And building trams is the best example. Um, but there are other ones. And in the context of Southampton and uh, pan Hampshire, we’ll get a sure in discussion into what some of those issues are here. So what are,

If you read the paper that Ed Balls and Anna Stansbury with some of their co-authors have done, what are the binding constraints on growth in the regions of England broadly? They are often transport related but not exclusively. What are the things that drive regional economies?

Largely opportunities like innovation and better connecting innovation assets with some of the risk rest of the real economy. So initiatives like the Center of South are so important because universities are not bit players in this. And when I talk about structures, I don’t just mean ones that politicians design and run.

My organization isn’t run by politicians, it’s business led. Those structures, whether they’re official ones set up by the government with public money or whether they are coalitions of the willing or individual institutions like this one trying to address its purpose and that of its partners.

Those things do really matter. So I had a couple of sort of, in order to give you the lessons that I’ve been told to bring, uh, by John, I have brought some lessons with me, but they are not lessons in which I think we are giving kind of good news from

The tablet of stone. I’m not a wild civil servant, I don’t think I know all the answers and I know your area better than you do. They’re merely observations about things that we’ve made mistakes on that you might want to learn from. And uh,

Essentially truths that I think probably people in the room probably already know, but that it’s useful for us all to share that are actually their common experience. So the the first one I’ve sort of talked about, which is that this isn’t a zero sum game.

So regional economic development is not the Hunger Games. You mean I do not need to take GVA value from the Solent back to the north with me tomorrow for us to grow our economy. That is how treasury civil servants think it works by the way.

So you mean I you may laugh, but that is how they think the economy works. If you look at how the Green Book works, it assumes that basically all investment leads to displacement and we shouldn’t do any of it because it’ll just displace things around the country.

That is why we don’t do anything in this country to address productivity because of the limited chance that we might steal economic growth from a neighbouring city or town rather than from our European competitors, which is what usually happens. So the treasury doesn’t think that businesses can locate in Barcelona or in

Stratford in in Stuttgart. They think that the only choice they’ve got is between Southampton and Manchester. And in reality that isn’t true. But that’s how British public policy is wired. So I do talk about zero sum game being a fallacy, but you,

You have to say that because some people do think it’s true. Uh, and then you get to some really basic stuff, right, which is that in the long story of New Labrum, what was the Northern way and regional assemblies, which didn’t work largely because the treasury at the time

Under Gordon Brown’s leadership didn’t want to give away too much. Uh, outside of London and the Deval nations, there’s also a genuine argument about whether kind of other than regions like the Northeast, which I would argue have real identity,

I don’t think anyone in this room would argue the Southeast really exists as a coherent geographic political concept. And even for example, the Northwest actually is a bit of a stretch because if you ask people in Cumbria where they live, they say they live in the north and they look to Newcastle,

Not to Manchester. And so we were always probably talking as someone who was then involved in the Labor Party, uh, very heavily. We were probably always trying to impose a construct that wasn’t ever going to work. And boundaries are really important and they’re why most politicians struggle

With devolution because the first thing politicians work out is whether the person who ends up running the thing they’re talking about will be from their party or someone else’s party. I would always say that politicians often can’t count. They often also make mistakes about that,

Which means they make assumptions about who will end up winning their respective elections that are probably incorrect. And the West Midlands is a perfect example of that to mean Andy Street is a conservative in a part of the world that mathematically cannot elect a conservative matter, yet it has done so twice.

And so anyone who assumes that if they create a political structure with just the right people in it, it will always vote the way they want it to, is also probably often uh, disappointed. And at a very basic level, um, lots of the, the historical metropolitans of England and the old county councils,

Which is what West Yorkshire is, it’s what South Yorkshire is, it’s what greater Manchester is. These are building blocks that were easy to put together because they had existing transport authorities. But if you go back to the kind of the stories that Michael Heseltine would tell you, um, Lord Heseltine,

If he was here about Redcliffe Maud people have tried to remake the map of local government in England for it to make more sense for a long time. You are building blocks here that are quite hard to build with and they often don’t make a lot of sense.

And particularly when you stray beyond as the Sheffield City region tried to do, as did lead city region under the coalition and in the Osborne Cameron years into historical counties with their district councils, um, that just didn’t work. Now there is no case in which the bits of Nottinghamshire and Darbyshire that

Wanted to be in the Sheffield City region are not really in Sheffield. They’re more in Sheffield than most of South Yorkshire. Everyone who lives there commutes to Sheffield. Everyone looks to Sheffield. But just because they historically happen to be in Darbyshire places like Chesterfield that are fundamentally linked to Sheffield,

That’s where their economy is driven from. They were not allowed to be in those DeVol areas. And one of the problems with the current devolution construct is that until the levelling up, uh, bill became an act, you needed consent right from everyone.

And the county councils involved in the case of Sheffield City region took it to court, right? And they won. Do you mean that they..they insisted they had to have consent for those? So the path of devolution of kind of true love in the north of England,

We project this idea that it’s been this huge success and it’s been really easy and it’s worked brilliantly because that’s a good thing to do. You should talk up the successes you have. But coming to a place where it has not been easy to land evolution deals,

There are also many parts of the north of England where we have not largely ’cause of geography managed to do this. Do you mean like the threat of having to unitise, which was around for a while? We’ve..we’ve done that in some places. North Yorkshire now the biggest geographical unitary in England,

It was the biggest old county. It is now a single council because it, it was kind of required to do that to get the best evolution deal on the table. The good folk in Lancashire have resisted any attempts to have a mayor imposed on them because they knew it would lead to Unitarization,

Which might be a good idea. And in fact sometimes in the last few years there’d been a leader of the county council who thought it was a good idea and was prepared probably to abolish themselves and their own organization to get a better outcome. But the system entrenched self-interest,

Often party political interest has meant that hasn’t happened. So there are still a few places in the north of England despite us having way over two thirds of the population now in an area with the DeVol settlement, it being the default,

Particularly in the larger cities and having landed a devolution deal in York and North Yorkshire, which is largely a rural area, electing a mayor of a big rural county in a small city. That is not what most conservatives in other parts of the country tell you is

Possible. If you talk to people in Essex who don’t like devolution, if you talk to uh, people in Grant chap’s neck of the woods who killed Hartford devolution, these people believe that devolution is sort of gonna destroy their district councils.

That it’s a political death sentence to the local concerns of association in the north of England. Things do play differently because when you look at Andy Burnham and realize what he has been able to do to galvanise his population,

Get real public and business support for things he wants to do and have a ability to negotiate even with the government of the opposite party successfully, it does change your opinion about what you might be prepared to accept. And what we are now starting to see,

I think is a maturity about the fact that these structures that mayors were kind of the price you had to pay. So greater Manchester did not want a mayor, they never wanted one, but they wanted the power to franchise their bus network, which they really needed. ’cause buses in greater Manchester are terrible.

And the deal was, it was the last thing they were negotiating with the then conservative government and George Osborne as chancellor. And the deal was that Richard Lease, who was then the leader of Manchester City Council, had been elected by RA people in Crumps, which is a part of North Manchester.

And that if this power, which was quite a significant power that would enable private companies to be thrown outta the bus system, was to be given to him because he was the then chair of the combined authority when it was non mayoral,

Perhaps there needed to be a bigger mandate for that than just the 800 people in Crumps. And that was the argument, if you’re gonna take significant powers from central government and give them to a new organization, a new entity or an existing entity in that case,

Where does the legitimacy for that action come from? And what people often mistake about devolution is this is not about sucking the very limited powers left in local government up, it’s about taking things from central government in a swag bag out of Whitehall after you do your deal,

Getting back on the train or in your car and driving back to where you came from and doing your small bit to reduce the over centralization of the British states. Now it’s only a small bit ’cause we’re talking about very,

Very baby steps right at the end of this chat I’ll get into some of the really serious stuff that even the French have got round to doing, um, that we should do. But this is the start and it’s about building institutional capability.

So definitely worth doing. But it’s not, it’s not revolution. This is evolution. And the funny thing about it is that it was the then conservative government that insisted on it. But actually if you think about what’s been the most disruptive thing to the British constitution in the last decade,

It has been the creation of metro mayors. Um, it’s created some political problems for the Labor party as well. Um, not most notably obviously in the last few weeks over what’s happening around, uh, the internal disputes with the Labor Party about Gaza.

But fundamentally this is about changing the British state so that not all power rests in the centre and these directly elected politicians, people in their areas often feel they should have more power. And that is creating an unavoidable kind of an kind of

Absolutely kind of natural osmosis now where things as they did through the Trail Bay process, which gave a bit more away to the West Midlands and then greater Manchester, but will give powers away to the other existing mares. It’s gonna carry on forever now it’s, it’s impossible to stop.

And the fact that Gordon Brown, who had been not the greater supporter of English evolution, uh, in whatever form when he was probably not a big fan of regionalism, maybe it was because of how it was done, institution capability,

Lots of reasons has now written a review for the Labor Party about a year ago saying this is the only show in town we should get on with it and we should use these existing structures and we should build on them.

And so you also now have a degree of political consensus across both main parties that yes, we have got the need to create significant entities outside Whitehall that can take decisions closer to people and to businesses that can have more understanding of the detail than what’s needed to drive at productivity. And it,

This is not debated any longer, the argument is how quickly you can go and how much risk you’re prepared to take a central government by giving things away. Um, and how much departments can be forced by particularly agile or particularly effective ministers to give away what is things they consider to be their

Responsibility. ’cause that’s how the Civil service and many junior ministers and lots of departments think so I’m sure Michael gave will give away anything he could control. But if you try and get anything outta the Department of Education for example, that’s very tough.

It took Manchester years to get even their adult education budget they’d been promised because a deal and a piece of paper did not mean that civil servants suddenly thought that was a good idea or that the minister who then turned up after the next reshuffle thought it was a good idea.

So we’ve covered kind of the basics of boundaries and politics and where I wanted to kind of finish really was about cities and about some of the, kind of the very particular kind of what the next big things could be because they’re the things that we should focus on,

Not the very limited things that have been achieved so far. Um, and we did some work with Metro Dynamics who’ve also done work here in Hampshire as well at various points in the last few years to look at productivity in greater Manchester.

And it was very clear alluding to that trend I mentioned about London before, that what had driven the productivity in Greater Manchester was largely connectivity. Because if you looked at the bit of Manchester, greater Manchester, that has not done so well in the last 15 years, it’s what’s called the Northwest Quadrant.

And anyone who’s familiar with greater Manchester will know that that’s places like Wigan and Leigh. And what Wigan and Leigh don’t have is any trams. So in everywhere else in greater Manchester, they’ve got, they’ve got round to building trams because Wigan in particular is quite a long way from Manchester. The, the,

The natural extension of the tram network had just not happened. And so although Network Rail had eventually got round to electrifying the line from Bolton to Manchester, that in itself hadn’t done enough to really move the dial.

So the bit of greater Manchester that did the worst in the last 15 years was the bit that was least connected to the city center, but remembered productivity growth was higher outside the city center in the other districts than it was in the city itself.

So this idea that somehow cities steal things from towns and people might remember the Center for Towns were set up a few years ago, it’s disappeared again. But this debate in British public policy, which the prime minister used at his conference as a device alongside canceling

HS two, was to argue he was gonna invest in towns. Well actually the proof of the pudding is that if you want to make towns thrive, you need to connect them to successful cities. That’s what works largely. Uh, and often successful towns are based on, um,

People bringing income from the place they work often in a city back to their town might be things in the town as well. But a big part of that ecosystem is people bringing their wages back and spending them at the weekends and in the evenings.

And if you get a train from Manchester to Bradford on something called the Colder Valley line, which is the kind of really old Victorian railway that makes its way through those communities goes to such glamorous places as Rochdale Tom forth that open innovations in Leeds makes the very good point.

And as a little graph that will show you that the poorest places on that line are Bradford and Manchester. The towns in between them, often old mill towns are significantly more prosperous. Now you look at the central Manchester and go, oh, there’s lots of money here,

But you walk a couple of miles away and you’re in some most deprived wards in England. And so this concept that cities somehow hoard wealth and steal it from their surrounding towns is probably the biggest fallacy in economic development. And it’s why devolution often doesn’t work ’cause people fear that or it’ll all

Go to the city. And actually the point is a lot of investment should probably go to that city ’cause a lot of the value generated will come back out to your community. And if you haven’t got the right transport system, obviously I bang about transport this evening,

Then you won’t get those positive effects. But if you have got decent connectivity between your towns and your nearest city, then the city benefits from that larger travel to work area and the towns benefit from the benefits of being a commuter town.

Being a commuter town is not a bad thing. People talk about it like, it’s like some sort of being subservient and it being a bad thing. It’s, it’s the worst. I mean all of the most successful towns in the north of England like such

Glamorous place as a stockport because they’ve got the best connection to their nearest city and thus they’re the most prosperous place around that city. It’s not something to be ashamed of, it’s a good thing. But somehow in British public policy we struggle with the idea that agglomeration economics is a good idea.

And although the civil service and the treasury do agree about that as much as they, they might cause me trouble around displacement, it’s very hard to win a public argument about why investing in cities is a good thing. But we need to,

’cause otherwise we will not be able to address the fundamental productivity issues that address that bedevil the rest of the country, including almost everywhere outside London because even the successful places are still in global terms and European terms not that productive. Um, and then the,

The kinda last thing I wanted to talk about really was about what comes next. And I mean the, the, the basic point is of what we kind of covered I suppose is, is kinda devolution good, centralization bad? Do you mean it’s a complicated dialectic, uh, for November evening, um,

If there are any ex or current civil servants in the room, I am very sorry. Uh, clearly this talk wasn’t for you. Uh, and we should have put a better warning on it that this wasn’t gonna be an evening you were gonna find enjoyable or pleasant. Um, the, the kinda next big things

Are that the real problem is, is where the money goes, right? Uh, and various institutions digitally who talked about this, but also just in the last few weeks, the Fabians, the Resolution Foundation and and NEF just this week, uh, new economics foundation ourselves as a organization,

We talked about it in the last few months as well, this concept of sort of fiscal devolution. So where does the tax go? So the reason why things in Southampton don’t always work the way you want them to is not because the local council here is either good or bad.

I mean I happen to know people involved in the council here, it’s not, I’m not gonna cast aspersions either way, but most of the decisions they make are simply because they are rule takers from central government. They get allocated a certain amount of grants which is not nowhere near enough

Usually and they are capped in terms of the council tax they can raise. And so their choice is what do you cut? That’s what every council now chooses every year. What do you choose to cut? And yeah, in the first few years there probably was some fat. Do you mean after,

Uh, 13 years of labor government? Labor government had been very generous in many ways to local government, particularly in more deprived parts of the country. Um, but now almost a very big chunk of what you find is spent in your local area is the council tax that is raised locally.

And the ability of your council to raise council tax depends on how many larger properties there happen to be in your area. So if you’re a part of the country with a large number of larger properties, then you’ve probably found the last 13 years that not that that difficult if you

Are a part of the country with a large number of smaller, less valuable dwellings when they were last valued in 1991. So there’s a bit of a lottery to this. It’s not about real house values, it’s just what they were when this tax was first created, then you might be all right. Uh,

And we’ve done a lot of work on more generally what you need to do in this space, but specifically on how you reform council tax because all these whizzbang things I’ve talked about, metro mayors and deals with government and getting more powers and all this, it’s all very wonderful actually.

But the existential problem is that none of this will happen because whilst we are fiddling around with these new structures, local government, most parts of England will just go bankrupt and there’ll be no councils to be in these combined authorities along with these mayors because they’ll all be

Spending their time with commissioners sent in by the government because there’s no money to run their services. So if you want to do anything to increase decision making and local economic development thinking in local areas and give them more tools to do that,

You’ve got to pay for adult and children’s services because unless you do that, you can’t do any of the interesting stuff you might want to do. So we are not an organization particularly focused on local government finance, but anybody who’s interested in this stuff has to be because if you don’t fix

That under the rest of it will work. And it puts a focus on a wider issue, right? Which is that very few of the decisions made locally are ones that are genuinely locally derived. So if local areas make good investment decisions, the taxes that that generates largely go back to Whitehall.

So as a politician, you are in no way incentivised in local governments make difficult long-term choices or invest in things that are gonna raise productivity because you see almost none of the benefits, none of them. So if you are doing stuff to make your economy and your area more productive,

You’re basically doing it out of the goodness of your hearts because your local political incentive is to do things that are popular. Actually you’re never probably gonna be there in 30 years to inherit the productivity issue you might have created by not investing in adult skills or

Not dealing with the fact there wasn’t a decent transport system. So all these kind of quite thorny difficult long-term decisions don’t have any financial mechanism to pay for them. And there’s no financial incentive for local areas to try and find private

Sector funded ways to do it because they’ve got nowhere capturing off the benefits. So how you fund local areas to do this stuff is really important. That’s why in those trailblazer deals that the West Midlands and greater Manchester got that I alluded to earlier, the kind of gold standard of devolution,

Which is still like nowhere near what most countries have had for the last 30 years, but it’s a good start. The single pot is the good is the big idea, right? Which is the idea that as rather than simply implementing lots of government programs,

You get a check from the government as greater Manchester or the West Midlands and you can spend it as you wish. And it means that if you want to align your justice interventions, so your crime prevention and what you do with offenders with what you’re doing

About skills, you can choose to do that rather than looking at them in silos. Because at the level of greater Manchester to the West Midlands, you can practically do that, that it’s impossible to do that for the whole country, at least not sustainably.

And what that then lends itself to is if you can generate more business rates or another tax, can you keep some of that or all of that upside so that you can then reinvest that money in other things in the future so that rather than always having to go

Back to Whitehall for another handout, actually you can start to fund sustainably the things you need to do, capture the benefits of that and then reinvest them. And the only reason why that isn’t simple to do is that many parts of England, basically everywhere outside London largely is a,

Is reliant on fiscal transfers. And so in order to do this you’re gonna have to rip up the system of wiring in existing local government finance. Um, and so it’s not simple, it’s not easy, but it’s exceptionally necessary because what we have probably done

With the mayors we’ve already created and if you ever have one here or another model here is we’ve created people whose job it is to give away sweeties. And that’s a good start. Someone who can do nice things, positive things in a place. But that’s not really what governing is actually about.

What governing is about is is having to decide and there are often lots of good things you could do. What is really important is having the knowledge and understanding to be able to make the very best choices sort of kind of like the kind of British cycling equivalent of public policy, right?

So in this country we make lots of suboptimal decisions all the time from from the center ’cause they don’t understand what is really needed in a place. So you then start giving the money to places and they make better decisions.

And in the kind of marginal gains kind of Dale Vince’s of how Britain got good at cycling, it’s all about making little improvements and then you, you notice a significant change, right? And you can do that if you’ve got much more control over the money and where it goes.

’cause you can allocate it much more smartly to the things that will have the very best payback. And when Greater Manchester went to see Osborne in the very beginning of the Steve Evolution journey nearly 13 years ago now, ’cause the non mayoral combined authority,

The thing that became the mayor was actually a piece of legislation introduced by labor government. It survived the coalition coming in and it was implemented and they went in, Howard Bernstein went in to see George, uh, who was a neighbouring MP in Cheshire.

And it was never about asking for more money actually it was never about money. It was about saying we will take the money you spend central government and we will spend it better. And in an era where an incoming government of whatever party is likely not to have very much money. Funnily enough,

This policy has been very interesting to uh, people in the political world because most public policy solutions that most people give you, they say if you give me some money, I will do X, Y, or Z. And that’s very interesting and very noble and often very important.

But the government already spends lots of money actually and a lot of it is spent quite badly. So before you start working out what more money you need, the most basic idea that any central government politician can come up with is how do I spend the money we spend now better?

And then the treasury will be probably more likely to gimme more money actually. ’cause that’s how the treasury does think. Um, and as long as the treasury remains as important in British public policy as it has been for the last 50 years, that really matters. Um, so it’s been an absolute pleasure, uh,

To come on the road and see you this evening. Um, I’ve tried not to uh, pass my thoughts about Hampshire and Pan Hampshires, uh, and embarrass myself by not understanding your place as well as you do. But that’s kind of the point that I’d be very interested to hear your thoughts

About how this feels and what this means to you here because the whole point of this is that my entire intellectual point this evening is that me or anyone else from outside of this part of the world is for the very worst person to make

Decisions about your future. I think you should make them. And so this evening it’s a pleasure to be invited to hear from you a little bit more hopefully about what you think needs to happen in this part of the world to address the types of binding constraints that people like understands by others

Rightly identify, are holding our country back. But they’re holding different parts of the country back in slightly different ways in different places. And it’s one thing to address what those wider national issues may be. But if you can address them in each place and spend money on exactly what those

Constraints might be and address them in the most effective way possible, then you will genuinely get the more productive economy that will allow you to address the inequalities that absolutely exist here. Because what is true of every more prosperous place we have them in the north like the Cheshire Warrington economy,

Which is actually very similar to this one is that even the most successful economic places often have very high levels of inequality. And if you want to find ways to address those inequalities, you’re gonna have to uh, create a, a boat that rises even higher.

’cause it’s much easier to share the gains of success than to try and reallocate the scarce resources you already have. And what most people I think in local government had forgotten and we need to teach them again and we need to teach central government,

Is that before you can have an argument about distributing the gains, you have to work out how to create them. So actually economic success making places thrive is not antithetical to sustainable or more appropriate forms of economic growth. What you might call good or inclusive growth.

You can only have good or inclusive growth if you have growth. And that’s not easy maybe for someone on the left to to hear. But someone from the left historically who went to go and work for Tory, uh, and works for now across party organization,

I would be really clear in saying there’s nothing wrong with growth and there’s nothing wrong with wanting to distribute it better. And that should probably be where the political consensus moves nationally, but it also needs to move there locally and regionally as well.

So thank you very much Henry for that, uh, really engaging, uh, candid and uh, slightly provocative talk. Um, hopefully it gets lots of questions happening from the floor. You’ll see we have Hannah and Pooja who are a couple of knowledge exchange fellows with the Center for the South.

They have roving mics that they will bring to you. Um, so if you have questions, please raise your hand and we’ll get them moving around. Okay. Whatever you just start with you just introduce yourself as well when you Sure Thing. I’m I’m first, which is terrifying. It’s good. Um, so hi, I’m Dr.

Jack Pink. I’m a research fellow in archeology here. Um, I’m just curious in your conversation, you talked a lot about economy, you talked a lot about uh, devolving power, but you did start at the beginning talking a bit about identity and the way

People sort of identify with a place. And what I’m curious about is, is there a role for heritage assets or sort of to use a more, a broader term cultural assets, um, to contribute to this sort of this idea of devolution and the things you’ve been

Talking about today? Or is that something that comes in further down the line? Because you know, in the context of the north you’ve got cities like Liverpool and Manchester with really strong cultural and heritage assets there and actually contribute quite a lot to identity moving south of Bristol,

Which has got done a lot of work in its own sort of cultural heritage sector. So I’m just curious if you think that factors in and if you do, how it does, I mean, so there’s an eCommerce reductive answer, right? Which is if you’re in Liverpool,

Those assets are quite important to the economy, right? So it’s a thing like Eurovision right, is a good galvanising thing for Liverpool, but also a chance for the political establishment in that part of the world to demonstrate what leadership allows you to achieve. So you have more control over your own place,

You can do bigger better things that you can’t do without a degree of autonomy right from the centre. I think that could of, if you think about if you apply this to how nations emerge, right? There is definitely a thing that if you’d, if the,

If any government of the day of the last 25 years has had some sort of idea of something that would be good for the north, they’re not doing that exclusively because there happens to be some truth to the idea. You can agglomerate the economies along M 62 ’cause there’s 8 million people and

They’re quite near each other. And that’s a bit like London. The reason they’re not saying I’m gonna create an M 62 corridor economic project is ’cause that doesn’t work the same way. If that makes sense. Um, talking about something like Northern Identity where people like Brian Green’s

Written a book about it, it’s widely discussed as a, as a concept and it is meaningful to people that is more potent right, than just picking things because they are necessary obvious economic clusters. Um, and I I think what is interesting is that, that nobody thinks to themselves, um, I live in uh,

The this particular combined authority and thus that gives me a sense that that the world is better. What what you need to do is key into some, some thought that is, is this something that is meaningful to people and does it make sense to structure particularly kind of political power around a particular,

A particular place and bring places in because they share something common. Um, I think it’s interesting that the mayor in West Yorkshire, because she’s from Jamina background as an actress and was uh, famously in in in Cory, like Tracy Brabin talks a lot about the cultural sector and its importance and

Big jamborees like Bradford city of culture become quite important opportunities for a place to talk about its own future and reinvent its future the way that holded with city of culture as well. But I would be cautious in a way that you don’t overplay the importance of the historical assets because often

The real communities that we’re talking about are much smaller than the levels you have to kind of move people up to make these sorts of things work. So actually the problem with travel to work areas is they are big. Do you mean Pan Hampshire’s about 2 million? That’s not unusual in size.

A lot of them are bigger than that. In reality the north is a kind of wider kind of, kind of sort of attempted equivalent to a kind of Chinese mega city except a lot of the people are a bit further away from the center than you really need

Them to be. It’s about 15 million. Well that, that’s not, that’s not gonna evoke the very local ideas and institutions and histories and stories that we need. People, people will always weave into their lives. And I think one of the challenges of this debate is that I think in,

In many people’s eyes what you just need to do is make local democracy strong again. ’cause that’s something people often do believe in. I was a local councillor in Newcastle. People believe in Newcastle is a thing. People who live there know they live there. The problem is that even Newcastle,

A core city cannot drive its own economy on its own. And a hundred thousand people who work there every day commute from not Newcastle. So if you want the government to invest money in Newcastle, it can’t just be for the people who live there has to be for the people who commute there.

And a lot of the people who commute to Newcastle live in Sunderland and their story and their, their assets are completely different and they define themselves ’cause of football and lots of other things as explicitly not Newcastle do it make sense?

They don’t want it to be the regional capital ’cause they think sunderland’s important. So sometimes whether they be football rivalries or they be heritage assets probably set people who have common shared economic interest against each other. And one of the challenges actually is to allow people to still feel very proud

To be from Southampton, but to realize that their economy is deeply tied to the fact that they’re near Portsmouth. And that’s okay actually. You don’t want to make people believe they are something then the concept of greater Manchester. Like people don’t mind it,

But no one like feels particularly fuzzy about it. Does that make sense? But they all, nobody objects to it because it does make sense because a lot of people who live in greater Manchester commute to Manchester every day. So it’s fine.

It’s not but it’s not, it’s not evocative of anything if that makes sense. And sometimes that’s okay, but there are exceptions, right? The northeast as a thing I said earlier and as a region, that’s why Prescott tried the referendum there because you you did,

You thought people thought that could work because Northeast regional identity is genuinely very strong. Um, English regional identities are quite complicated and lots of people do lots of research, a lot more learned than me. But they’re, they’re very variable and often they’re overlapping. So people um,

Might feel a strong sense of local place Thai and they may also feel very northern. They might not identify with what might actually be their travel to work area. What we’ve done, because all these structures are quite linked together in the northern story is

That the mayors the north, it’s all sort of interchangeable because they’re all, these are multi-layered, tailored, kind of multi-layered governance approach. All the people are involved in all the stages of it. Does that make sense? All binds it together. So it’s okay,

People can key into the northern debate ’cause they believe in Manchester or they can key into what’s good for Manchester ’cause it’s good for the north. That makes sense. You’ve gotta make it easy for people. And maybe that’s why we’ve done it because we know that there is no overwhelming

Single identity that is gonna make this work. And as John and others have written about extensively, Englishness Britishness, that’s a similar problem, right? So there’s, we’re not, this is not the only place in, in contemporary life in this country where we have this problem.

Great. Okay, so a couple of questions. We’ll start in the corner over here. I’m a little bit disappointed because you, I don’t think you gave us one specific example of what you’ve learned actually. So I’m, I’m an individual that lives in Portsmouth and I commute to Southampton on a daily basis.

And the reoccurring theme from what you said was that transport links are important in, I mean, what what would be interesting to know is if the solidification of the Manchester Transport system was based on a net inward investment or generation

Of funds internal to the area, because it seems to have made a difference. It has is created an identity usually from people that go from the outside into Manchester. They recognize it because of the transport links. You can go to Berry in 25 minutes and it all of a sudden does create that.

So the lesson that you did give was that we needed to raise funds locally through financing that was independent of central government. Would that be possible to reverse some of the things that beaching did and allow Portsmouth and Southampton to communicate with each other and generate the kind

Of infrastructures that would support an economic growth and make things better? Great. Um, do you wanna take another one or I was gonna, I was gonna stand up again. I was just listening to, I was just listening, sitting for a second to listen. I mean,

I think at the moment the political structures don’t allow you to do that. And that’s the problem. So the greater Manchester experience was they started off taking old railway lines that nobody used and turned them into tram lines. ’cause that’s the cheapest ways to build a mass transit system.

And then they started doing more expensive tram lines when they could get people to use that system. And then it proved to government that the business case was better. ’cause the whole point about this is the green book is, is easier to get round once you’ve done something. Does that make sense?

So when you wanna do the first thing in a place, it doesn’t work. The maths don’t work. You do a second. And the third thing, because you’ve got data that proves people use this stuff and you can show the value and uplift of the land around the stations, you can get more money.

So there, there were two routes. The traditional route would say you need a government that’s more pro infrastructure and, and you need to align the interest of the local politicians or MPs and do good advocacy. That is what everyone’s had to do for the last 30, 40 years.

And it is success and it has worked for places like Manchester. But the limit to that comes whenever there’s a period of significant austerity where the cost of borrowing goes up and basically central government gets cold feet and then you are left in the position.

Where would you be better off example being able to retain a penny of national insurance across say Pan Hampshire and then use that to borrow against to build your infrastructure? Perfectly rational, sensible thing to do doesn’t require central government to bury any,

Borrow any more money. But it does require central government to trust you, to make your own decisions. And it’s interesting actually, if you look at the way it works, local areas with mayors now get a transport settlement that would allow to exactly those sorts of things.

It’s pretty much automatic now with every devolution deal. If you just gave people a penny of their national insurance, it equates to about the same amount of money. So there is always a question for me as well, which is I would always rather take locally raised funds rather

Than central government money because those five year settlements, a future government could just stop doing them and then you could start building a mass transit system across Pan Hampshire, get halfway through it, and then run outta money because central government pulled the funding. Well,

If you take national insurance forever and borrow against it, then it’s impossible for that to be withdrawn. And so my, my kind of suggestions are based on my experience of the fact that central government changes its mind all the time and it’s that changing its mind that often does the most damage.

Often people come along as the authors of the white paper levelling up do and that lasted about six months before that got through in the bin. Do you mean it’s largely disappeared now in government and it was the most important thing Boris Johnson did, and it lasted about six months.

So the Northern Powerhouse lasted about five years before central government dropped. It completely, probably only had two or three years of genuine, proper support. So based on the current lifespan of government initiatives that are ambitious in this space, I would always take locally raised money if you can get it above central

Government funding because you can control that then. And if you don’t like the way your local politicians spend that money, you can chuck them out. It’s very hard for the people of Southampton or Portsmouth to chuck out central government. You get two MPs, whatever per city.

Do you mean You cannot influence the course of central government in reality as a place, but you can control who runs your own area and that is how it should work. Do I mean people locally should be able to hold to account the people who have

The choice about how they invest your money. And if you don’t like how they’re doing it, you can throw them out. If you like how they’re doing it, you can keep them. That’s how local democracy should work. At the moment.

We don’t have local democracy because we elect people who haven’t got any power to do anything other than cut things for us that probably anyone would have to cut because a lot of the things, there’s only one legal choice at the moment. So that’s about democracy, but it’s also about practicality.

I think that’s would be my argument anyway. But it’s not a, this isn’t Aristotle, right? I’m not giving you kind of political theory from the Athenians. This is like British public policies, rubbish. How do you do stuff despite it? I mean, I’m not, I’m not arguing this is an uplifting presentation,

But I just think I, I’m, I, I was asked to give lessons. My lesson is don’t suddenly presume that the next government will be better than the one you’ve got now, if you take that assumption, then you’ll be surprised when they help you more than you thought they would

Rather than disappointed when they screw you over. Ah, Very good. Or just the language. Um, so we’ve got a few, two language issues, a few questions there. So I think Next Gentlemen, Hello, I’m, I’m Dave Shields. I’m a local counsellor here in Southampton.

And I was interested and I’ve been watching from afar the evolution of the evolution in the north. Um, and you know, wondering how on earth we could replicate that down here. And we seem to be going round in circles. Um,

And it did strike me when I look at Greater Manchester as the example that you gave, you had 10 metropolitan single tier authorities, eight of which were labor, one of which was liberal Democrat. And I think Stock Stockport and Trafford was conservative. So the,

It was relatively easy. Well, I’m looking from afar, um, seeing that there’s some kind of political consensus could be forged that doesn’t really beckon down here in the south where we have very large, uh, two-tier, uh, county, uh, environments, which tend have historically tended to belong to one party.

And then you might have, uh, at the, with a few unit trees that are here that have been hard, uh, for, they, they, they might go differently, but it’s really difficult to get any kind of consensus and trust where you’ve got not only the different politics but different models there.

And I just wondered how we might want to break that log jam down here in the south where the model that that, that might have worked, say north of the Humber or you know, um, doesn’t really apply down here. And I just wonder what thoughts you might have you could share with us.

I, I think it’s really hard and I, I think I come bearing the fact that there is no easy answers, right? Because if if there were easy answers you’d have already come up upon them, right? I think, I think, think I’m, I’m,

I’ve got the humility to say that the mayoral devolution model that has worked for the north of England does not work everywhere. And the fact we can make it work in rural North Yorkshire and Unitarize loads of local Tory district councils with people bleeding about it,

That is unique political circumstances that we have created. And it’s like, that’s George Osborne’s legacy, right? He created mayors and they’re popular. The Tory’s managed to win T side, won the Teas Valley mayoralty. Lots of local Tory politicians suddenly discovered they didn’t hate mayors

Anymore. Which I mean these are a series of political events and historical events now that you cannot simply replicate in other places. You can’t create what are very unusual circumstances that we’ve now got. And it’s not a mistake that we will very soon without breaking confidences

Have devolution all on one side, the Pennines and not on the other. Because even within the north there are different political currents depending which side of those hills you’re from. Does that make sense? So even within the north of England there is a multi-tiered kind of level of

Acceptance and particularly more rural places. Ironically electing labor and Lib Dems in Cumbria is what stopped evolution because then they thought, well I don’t want a Tory mayor. We’ve just got rid of the Tories in local government in our districts. Why?

So the Tory’s unitarize to get mayoral evolution and then labor and lib dem authorities decided they didn’t want it. So we’ve, we’ve had some really unusual sets of political permeations that are not that dissimilar to some of the issues you’ve had.

And I think what the reason I’m going to see your business group tomorrow business south partly is to to rabble, rouse them to apply pressure. ’cause I do think businesses have a legitimate role to say to their local political leaders, come on sort this out. That does help a bit.

Uh, and the political and business consensus in Greater Manchester is not talked about a lot, but it was never just the council in Manchester, it was always the business community and the council and the business community and the council shared view of what was possible with the local economy is what

Drove all the devolution discussions. And so whenever a minister or anyone came to Manchester, they would go and see any of the senior business people, it would all basically tell them the same thing they were hearing from the politicians. And that was very compelling to central government that they realized that this

Wasn’t just local politicians, it was the business community as well. I think in terms of practical models, I think that the imperfect and the agreeable is better than the perfect solution would be my biggest piece of advice.

So all of my experience has been that when you hold out for some sort of perfect model, you don’t get very much And West Yorkshire is our example, right? West Yorkshire held out for what this thing called a LEEDS city region, which is a bit like what I described around Sheffield,

But they didn’t get to the point of a legal challenge. It never even got that far. And they wanted to include things that are really part of Leeds’s region, places like Harrogate and SEL and places. But North Yorkshire County Council was never gonna let go.

And so it all died to death and that that meant that the second largest city in England in the north got devolution like three or four years later than it should have done, right? So you’re not the only people who’ve been in the waiting room.

The issue is you’ve been in there a lot longer than some people and you also have less relevant local examples or near proximus examples of what might be doable. Um, I I don’t think mayors have to be the answer everywhere. Um, as much as I think they’re a good thing personally, uh,

For lots of governance reasons, I think they’re helpful, but I don’t think they’re the right solution everywhere. And I think the, the very particular nature of two tier local government that unless you want to unitarize anyway, and I don’t think in Hampshire there is any mood for unitarization from my

Understanding then a mayor is hard to justify. ’cause although you probably get rid of the police and crime commissioner if you do it the right way or you might be able to, depending on the boundaries, you are creating more politicians which is also inherently unpopular with the

Public as much as it might be a good idea or necessary in some cases. So I think I came not wanting to give prescriptive advice because my whole point is I don’t think I should tell you what the answer is ’cause it’s for you to work it out, right? That’s the point.

But I do think that some of the things we’ve done and how we’ve gone about it in the north of England have made it harder for places like this because we’ve created a construct which is not suited to your needs. And for that I can only apologize it wasn’t deliberate.

And it’s very much Whitehall’s way that they find one thing that works and then tell everyone else they have to have that. The point is greater Manchester got to negotiate the devolution settlement. They had bespoke, everyone else has largely had it imposed on them.

Do you mean Ed you take this or you get nothing? That kind of Manchester got a fair deal, right? Because they got the combined authority largely they were, they were happy with other than having to have a mayor,

You are having to deal with the fact that you are basically getting a version of what Manchester negotiated back in 2004. And that’s not really how local democracy’s supposed to work. So, so I’m, I’m not taking all the blame. I think my good old friends,

The British state have got something to answer for as well. But it is, we are part of the problem, um, because we’ve created a model that probably was never going to work for you. And the particular nature of the history of unit trees carved out of blue, blue seas,

Do you mean that does not create collaboration potential because the, the ties between the city and the rural areas were literally cut deliberately for reasons of governance And that is quite hard then to put back 20, 30 years later. I think it’s just,

It’s just the reality of how local government reorganisation then plays out in the long term is that sometimes what might and probably was the right thing for your city isn’t the right thing for your city region in the long run. And putting that back together I think is,

Is hard and I’m afraid there isn’t an easy way to make it work unless you can find loads of people who want to unitarize for fun ’cause it’s great fun. So changing, changing logos, putting up new signs at libraries, it’s a great,

It’s a great we so if you there are any sort of secret unitarises in the room, good luck to you. But it’s not an easy thing to convince local politicians to go along with. Um, Henry, I’m Sue Littlemore, I’m director of Civic at the University of Southampton.

And I wanted to pick up on what you said about mayors. It’s not the only way of doing devolution. What do you think will be the future of this policy? So by this time LA next year we might have had a general election, there might be a change of government.

What would be your insight on whether that insistence on mayoral mayors for the most lucrative devolution deal, which has been the hallmark of this government, do you think that will carry on or there’ll be something a a a reset? I mean, so it’s interesting. So Lisa Nandy doesn’t do this job anymore,

But when she was the shadow levelling up secretary, she was very clear that having a mayor would no longer be kind of the golden ticket that it had been before. If you read the Gordon Brown Review, it’s less clear ’cause Gordon’s instincts I think probably were that

The mayoral model a bit like mine is probably the best we have now found. So we should try and stick to it where we can if we can. But things like if you just wanted the powers to do bus franchising,

Should you really have to have the mayor just to do that? Probably not. So there’s a, there’s a kind of an argument about where you draw the line, but if you want to have the kind of single pot from central government,

If you want to have business rates uplift retention for 10 years, whatever, what the things that Manchester and Greater, sorry, greater Manchester and West Middle negotiated, I do think you will struggle to win the argument that a group of local council leaders are the right group of people to make those decisions

Without having the mandate to be able to tell people why they’re making quite significant changes. So what will happen in the West Midlands and the greater of Manchester in the next 10 years is that public services will be different to the ones you get in

Other areas. Do you mean proportionate universalism? Of course, yes. But it will be not the same sort of proportionate universalism as everywhere else in the country. Do you mean? So public services will look markedly different in those places. And if you want to do serious public service reform that involves not just

Local services and the health system but DWP, all of those other things that does require someone to go into Whitehall on your behalf and have the authority to be able to negotiate with ministers. And I think the challenge you will have is that although you could hypothetically construct a perfectly reasonable governance method,

You don’t deal with the previous questioners problem. Which is that fundamentally some of these politicians do not have shared institutional interests. They do not necessarily the same interests in terms of the voters that elect them and they’ve completely different institutional priorities.

And so if you don’t have a central figure that has a mandate that sits above them, how do you resolve the differences of opinion between essentially the cities and the rural, which is really what we’re talking about in this part of the world. How do you,

How do you address the fact that actually a village’s needs are actually very similar to Southampton? ’cause often people who live in the village work in Southampton, but if you’re a local politician doesn’t feel like that. ’cause often it means you have to spend the money in Southampton to benefit

People in Hampshire. And that’s politically difficult And you, you want to avoid cake carving, right? So people get their money from government and go, oh what’s my share? And they take their cake back to their local authority and they go and eat it.

And they all do what they would’ve done anyway, but don’t do anything together. They just take their cake and go back to their office and go, right, that’s my cake. I’ll go and do my projects. You go and do your projects,

We’ll come back in a year and we’ll agree what we’re gonna spend the next load of money on. Well you are not gonna get significant economic benefit for the people of Hampshire Pan Hampshire. By doing that, you will get marginally slightly better outcomes than if you just gave that

Money to a civil servant. You’re only gonna get the benefits as if you think about the travel to work area as a single economic entity. And if the political mandates the people are so wildly different in the room, the combined authority won’t work unless you’ve got someone who genuinely does

Represent the interest of the whole of Pan Hampshire or whatever the geography may be. So it might be hard to get people to agree to a mayor, but to get to be able to take the decisions that you’ll need to take. It’s not just about the money, it’s about the powers. So yes,

Of course government can write anyone a check if it’s an accountable body, if it’s legally constituted, it can receive checks. But can you really take the hard decisions about what you need to do and what you don’t need to do, what you should stop doing to do something different because it’s more important.

How do you justify to people in rural Hampshire that they’re gonna have less buses so you can build mass transit to nearer their house? Does that make sense? If those are the decisions you have to make, how do you justify that? Unless you’ve got a mandate it can’t just swing on.

Do you mean one vote here or one vote there? ’cause one leader’s changed their mind ’cause they’ve been offered another mass transit stop. Do you mean otherwise you end up with port barrel politics and it doesn’t work? You’ve got to have the ability to shape and define what the shared interest of

The place is. And I think without a mayor in places where you don’t have a lot of political unity, the greater Manchester leaders argued they didn’t need devolution with a mayor. ’cause they all agreed with each other largely. And they were happy that the leader of Manchester Council,

Who was the chair of the command authority would act in the interest of Barry. We’ve just heard that that confidence and trust doesn’t exist within the political leadership of this part of the world. It just doesn’t, like no one here can step away from their own institutional self-interest and

Think about the whole entity. That’s why you’ve not done a evolution deal. It also means that person couldn’t then make those decisions. Who would chair the combined authority here? That would be out, wouldn’t, wouldn’t be unable to think about the whole place without considering first what

Meant for their own area. That’s the problem you’ve got. And you could create a system where you get an unelected bureaucrat to do that, but I just don’t think it’s the right outcome answer. I think you’re gonna have to find someone elected to do it.

But I might be wrong. But you might not need to start with that though. You could start with something small like sorting your bosses out and then get to trust each other and in five years you can have a mayor because it’ll take

You a while to work out where the government would send the checks. So don’t worry too much about Gold’s Standard evolution. It took Manchester who’d done this for 20 years till now to get to the point where they could get a deal like that our government.

So don’t solve the problems of tomorrow, today, solve today’s problems first and then worry about what you would need to do to be able to get to the final stage when you’re closest that point. Otherwise you’re making it far too difficult to get to the first step. Question. Sorry,

I had a question in the background. I mean all those are caveated by the fact I know nothing about Hampshire and I could be talking complete nonsense provocations and nothing more. I’ve got a, it should be quick. I think I want to, you’ve mentioned political unity. Uh, my name’s Howard Monk,

Senior Teaching Fellow and the International Music Management Masters. Um, but I’m from exotic Rochdale. As you uh, pointed out, I wanted to ask the question, do you think that there are winners and losers in the, in in the, so-called sort of success of this?

Because I I wanted to ask you sort of to what extent was the the political unity actually a a myth or was it, was it a real thing? Because I think that Rochdale is a bit of a barren sort of wasteland by

Comparison to Barry, which I know a lot of great work is being done, but I think um, but Barry was on the metro line from the get go and Rochdale only just joined it. So the, the comments that colleagues made about culture and so on,

I think that they ring true. Um, and and you mentioned Wigan. To what extent were they a little bit outta the picture and they didn’t sort of, um, uh, campaign for being included in such an important transport network for example? I mean the, it,

It is the most interesting story I know to tell and I didn’t know anyone would ask it from me tonight. So I, I feel privileged that I found, I found, I found a plant from Greater Manchester in the room. Tho those emails I sent round looking for anyone from, from such places,

Clearly came, came to good effect. So what’s interesting about the combined authority is that it was the leader of Wigan who used to be the key player, um, in the combined authority. Um, you can argue was he too interested in doing what was right for the whole

Conation and on of interest in Wigan. That was he, was he the the person in the room that was the person I’m talking about, the person who put the whole above their own area. And did, did his own area suffer as a result? Maybe it did.

Do you mean And but Greater Manchester wouldn’t happen without the, the now depart, the now sort of former leader of Wigan who did that. The Rochdale berry thing is brilliant. I I’ve literally written a report about berry and done loads of work in Rochdale. ’cause we find this your exact point very interesting.

Which is why has Berry worked better than other places in great Manchester? And obviously yes, their train line was the first one that got conferred to tram. But they also had some, they also did some very sensible things. So they invested largely in their town center rather than doing white box

Retail. And so Barry has this market that BBC breakfast like to go to, you may have seen it that’s famous around the north. People come from all over Lancashire to do their shopping in this market. Do you mean and it’s town center has got flats ’cause you can commute to

Manchester which weren’t particularly commercial when they were built, but actually now you can get 800 pound a month for a flat in the center of berry, which I mean I know house prices here are higher, right? But in a northern town center that is not normally what you pay for flat and

They’re in a nice block above a shopping center. Young professionals are happy to live in Berry Town Center and commute to Manchester. People do not choose to live in the center of Rochdale in the same way yet. Um, and RochDale’s big play is this thing called Atom Valley.

So it’s basically a big um, huge industrial stroke, commercial warehouse opportunity next to a motorway but would be the biggest manufacturing park in the uk. Massive opportunity. So I think Rochdale have a plan, right? For what RochDale’s future could be. But you are absolutely right that the relative timing of when places got

Connected to the metro system, same is true of Oldham as it is of Rochdale has had a big impact and the places started from a slightly different position, right? So the towns of greater Manchester were not all the same to begin with.

So some of ’em had more challenges, some had less. Um, and so I think my, my reflection would be you, it does matter how effective you are as a place within these structures arguing that your interest should be protected. But the most effective leaders usually are interested in both things.

They realize if you are the leader, ’cause the whole point about this command authorities is they’re made up their cabinets made up of leaders, right? So if you are the leader of Barry, you get a seat at the great Manchester table, so does the leader Rochdale,

So does the leader of Bolton, blah blah blah. Um, and that is the reality of how it works. And you all, you also get a job. So like the leader of Barry has a portfolio responsible for the clean air stuff in Manchester. Terrible one to get given ’cause it’s been a nightmare.

Another leader, the leader of Manchester is responsible for business for example. So you do have to step out of your local partisan, parochial self-interest to do that job. But you also do have to in those meetings think, oh is this gonna affect my area?

And bluntly the devolution deal in the end dressed on the fact that the Tory leader of Trafford wanted the metro to go to Trafford center. It was needing to go there anyways. It wasn’t like it was proper port barrel politics, but it was a little bit port barrel.

So it’s a little bit from column A and a little bit from column B. I don’t think local self-interest should die. I just think you need to be able to do that. At the same time as thinking about the bigger pie, it was easier for Manchester.

’cause bluntly the city center of Manchester benefits everyone in greater Manchester. It does and it makes its success and success of its universities and their connection to local employers in their area makes their areas more prosperous. What you’ve got to do is convince people who live in Hampshire that the success

Of Portsmouth and Southampton is good for their areas. And if you can win that argument, you can create greater Manchester in the Soland, right? If you want to. It’s not, it doesn’t have to be a core city surrounded by northern former mill towns

And commuter belts. I mean you can do it in other ways. The key point is economic shared interest. I mean do the PE and if you do the economic geography, ’cause I’ve read the analysis, your travel to work areas isn’t that different to Liverpool or Manchester?

Most people in Pan Hampshire work within Pan Hampshire do. I mean you have got a travel to work area, not that different to a northern city region. But the problem is the politics is very different and that’s what’s different. It’s not really economics that’s your prime problem.

It’s whether or not the people in the room really understand and genuinely believe the economics and actually understand that that self-interest is less important than the shared interest and that they’ve gotta find the right way to order those priorities. But I don’t think it’s easy and I don’t claim it’s easy.

And even in places where it’s been successful, it has never been easy. It’s always been hard everywhere because you are asking people to make difficult decisions and trade-offs that for 50 years we’ve left a central government. Having the power to choose and decide for yourself is not easy.

It’s hard, but it’s much better than someone else doing it to you. That’s the worst thing of all having to make these hard decisions for yourselves. It is infinitely better than having them imposed on you. Okay, that’s great.

What I’m gonna do is take a final batch of questions just so we don’t delay everyone too long. So I’ve got a question at the back and then Giles and was there another one I saw a hand? No. Well maybe those two, uh, before we wrap up.

Hi there. Uh, thanks. I’m Ollie Soutton, a partner at a law firm, but importantly I’m here today as part of business south. I sit on something called Regenerate South. So, um, we uh, started this uh, central south, um, idea some time ago working with John. Um,

And it came about as to try and identify from a business perspective what is our economic area. And we felt that part of this issue that we’ve all been discussing about today is what are we and and so forth is is actually quite a large amount of,

It is driven by what is that economic area. And we are hampered by being southeast, southwest. We’re hampered by do we look east, do we look west, do we look north? Uh, we’ve gotta include the a of white in this.

So one of the things that we are doing is trying to create a data set, uh, working with the ONS to create that data set for the central south so that that gives us a much better picture of actually what we’re talking about and where

This fluffy boundary is. So as from business perspectives, we we, we we we don’t really care about where the boundary gets drawn provided it gets drawn in a way that we cohesively, collaboratively work together for as you say Henry, the the greater good.

Also, just one other point is just to make everyone aware that there is an all party parliamentary group for the Central South Led by Caroline Dinenage. Sorry, sorry. Uh, okay. So, uh, uh, I’m Giles, I’m one of the associate directors for, for Central South.

What are the helpful things that the universities in your part of the world have done and what are the unhelpful things? I’d say we have a research collaboration of the research intensives, which your vice chancellor here used to be a member of.

’cause he used to be the VC at Lancaster, the N eight that pre-existed, the northern powerhouse rise. The northern universities had got their act together long before George Osborne came along. So kind of Pan Northern was alive and well in the university sector, um, long before any of the political structures came.

And what I would say is there are other parts of the country that have got similar calibrations. So universities coming together to form meaningful research partnerships on economic geography grounds is a now whether or not that tends to be pan regional. So whether, whether Pan Hampshire is pan enough for that,

I don’t really know. But that’s one thing very practically that other people have done. The northern universities in the case of Sheffield, Leeds and Manchester have set up something called Northern Gritstone to invest in their own spin outs. That’s a very obvious thing that is about driving the economy of the north of

England. Also now includes Liverpool invested in by public sector pension funds, but also other pension funds and individuals and businesses, um, who’ve put money into that. And I would say, I mean it’s very interesting. The vice Chancellor of Manchester has been on my board before I was appointed.

She was very much involved from the beginning, very involved in the early days of greater Manchester devolution. Um, I do think university vice chancellors play a big role in all of our devolve settlements actually. So York’s devolution deal is focused on the Bioeconomy,

Which is a big economic strength in that part of the world. That is all driven by Charlie Jeffries, the vice chancellor and his team at the university in York. Um, you look at the evolution deal in the northeast, all the northeast universities are bought into that, um,

And trying to make it work and thinking about how they can align with economic priorities being set by the combined authority. Um, so I think at the various stages of kind of deal making, universities tend to be quite important institutions because they have the hef

To be able to do thinking and they have institutional capability and most of that in places has now gone outside universities. Um, but I do think there is also a point which is that universities thrive in places where there is strong economic activity and where there are people

Who can capitalize and exploit the opportunities that universities present. And so this isn’t, this isn’t large s right? I mean this is a good thing to do from a civic perspective, but this should also be core business for universities in my opinion.

So why was Nancy Rothwell so fond of Northern powerhouse ’cause treasury in the early days and Northern Powers kept rh their checks so very good for business. If you were the University of Manchester, I think the Newcastle University got two things out of the northern powerhouse

As a kind of pan initiative. So Northern Universities did very well out of it. And there is a reason for that, which is if you look at the things that drive economic activity, innovation spend is probably the only thing that’s anywhere near as good as

Transport. And again, if anyone hasn’t read ed balls and Anna Stansbury’s paper, I recommend it strongly. It’s a good read. Um, and they put the case very compellingly for interventions that do make a difference. Sadly, lots of things we think are very important,

Like skills are not as impactful as we might first think they are bluntly to economic growth. They are interesting and useful and so don’t focus too much on the graduates you create because the evidence from Anna and her colleagues is that outside of London,

Even in regions like this premium is going down through the floor because we haven’t driven the economy of Southampton enough and of its neighbours. And the same is true in every other region outside London. So if you want to do something as a university,

Think about what will keep graduate salaries not just here but across England high. And that is driving regional economies outside London, including your own, because it is pretty existential to the university sector, which is if we don’t get our economies to be more knowledge intensive and create

More productive opportunities and be more driven by innovation that you create, they will not be a purpose for you to continue educating people. ’cause they will not earn enough money to justify the investment that they and the government put into them.

So I think that’s a pretty important reason why universities should care about this agenda because I think the, it is this, the weakness of British productivity that is devaluing British higher education for UK graduates. And as someone who’s a big fan of universities and of higher education and was a

Very much involved in the student movement, which is why I know this university from my time in that world, I am very worried about what the implications of poor regional growth are for universities as institutions and so way beyond the, the civic university agreement. This is a pretty existential challenge to universities.

If we can’t make the UK economy more productive, we don’t need universities to keep educating people the way they do today. And I think believing in widening participation myself, it would be very disappointing if the value of degrees got so low that no one bothered taking them anymore.

That to me would be a very sad indictment of our economy. Right? Um, so just conscious of time and we’ve promised, uh, Henry that we will feed him. So, uh, and I’m sure, uh, you know, we are, we’re all, we can see they are indeed, um, very good one.

So thank you so much for, for you know, what was, uh, at times inspiring at Times’s. A bit sobering, uh, some of those lessons from the north. Um, I wanna finish by thanking, in particular, thanking, uh, Pooja and Hannah for all that work in making this happen.

Um, but also just most importantly thanking, thanking Henry for coming along and sharing with us. Thank.