UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT of ORAL EVIDENCE to Be Published As HC 1083-I

UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 1083-i HOUSE OF COMMONS ORAL EVIDENCE TAKEN BEFORE THE COMMUNITIES AND LOCAL GOVERNMENT COMMITTEE DECENTRALISATION MONDAY 15 APRIL 2013 RT HON GREG CLARK MP AND RT HON DON FOSTER MP Evidence heard in Public Questions 1 - 61 USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT 1. This is an uncorrected transcript of evidence taken in public and reported to the House. The transcript has been placed on the internet on the authority of the Committee, and copies have been made available by the Vote Office for the use of Members and others. 2. Any public use of, or reference to, the contents should make clear that neither witnesses nor Members have had the opportunity to correct the record. The transcript is not yet an approved formal record of these proceedings. 3. Members who receive this for the purpose of correcting questions addressed by them to witnesses are asked to send corrections to the Committee Assistant. 4. Prospective witnesses may receive this in preparation for any written or oral evidence they may in due course give to the Committee. 1 Oral Evidence Taken before the Communities and Local Government Committee on Monday 15 April 2013 Members present: Mr Clive Betts (Chair) Bob Blackman Simon Danczuk Mrs Mary Glindon James Morris Mark Pawsey John Pugh Andy Sawford John Stevenson Heather Wheeler ________________ Examination of Witnesses Witnesses: Rt Hon Greg Clark MP, Financial Secretary to the Treasury, and Rt Hon Don Foster MP, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, gave evidence. Q1 Chair: Welcome, Ministers, to our session on decentralisation. Thank you very much for joining us this afternoon. I suppose the first question, to Greg Clark, is a pretty obvious one. It is just over two years since you came and told us about the report that you were producing for the Prime Minister on the performance of various Departments on decentralisation. It took rather a long time to get into the public arena, didn’t it? Greg Clark: It did not, Chairman. Can I just say what a pleasure it is to be back in front of this Committee? It is like old times. It is actually down to the Chair of the Committee that it is in the public domain at all. As you will remember, Chair, this was a private and personal assessment that I promised to give to the Prime Minister, a year after we took office, in terms of the performance of Departments. I think I let slip that I was providing such an assessment, and, being beady-eyed, you then asked the Prime Minister in the Liaison Committee if he would publish it. I think that was in about November of 2011. He said he would think about it, and then thought about it, and thought that he should. However, he asked that this be agreed with other Departments that were subject to my commentary. We sent it round, and got comments back. My original advice to the Prime Minister was on the first year of the reforms. As is the nature of these things, by the time we got halfway through the second year, colleagues perfectly reasonably pointed out that they had done different things since then, which they wanted in. Eventually, it was a bit longer than was ideal, but I think you got it at the end of last year. Q2 Chair: The slight worry is regarding the fact that Departments have to agree to the report. They are not going to agree to anything that is too damaging, are they? If you initially felt that there were things going particularly badly wrong, they are going to have those written out by the time it gets to the public domain, aren’t they? 2 Greg Clark: You will not be surprised to hear that there were some suggestions that I temper the scoring that I gave, and the assessment that I gave. However, I cannot remember that I agreed to any of them. In fact, I had some conversations with fellow Ministers in which they implored me to put them up a notch, and, I think without exception, I turned them down. Q3 Chair: You have said that the recommendations are your views. To what extent does Government now own them? Have they accepted them and said, “These are the things we are going to do”? Greg Clark: It is an unusual report, Chair, as you know. It was an entirely personal assessment to the Prime Minister that you caused to be put into the public domain, so it is not as if it were a report from an inquiry that was commissioned, to which the Government responds in a formal way. You have known me long enough, and had me before your Committee long enough, to know that I am passionate about this agenda of getting power away from the centre and into communities. Everything that I recommended in this report I stand by, and I will continue to press and agitate in public and private for them to be adopted. However, its genesis was personal advice, rather than official advice that had been commissioned and that needed to be responded to. I think it is reasonable that the Government does not respond in every detail through a formal submission. Q4 Chair: We have Don Foster with us, so he can respond to at least one specific. That is the recommendation that we have an annual report on decentralisation, and a date in Parliament with a statement by a Minister. Is that something that is going to happen? Mr Foster: No, I do not think it is. Q5 Chair: That is not a great start, is it? Mr Foster: That was one of the recommendations made in this private report, which you, Chair, caused to be made public, that is not being accepted by Government. There has been a change. We do not have a decentralisation Minister as such now working across Government. There is not anybody fulfilling that role now. I think it is more important to suggest—to you as Chair of this Committee, to members of the Committee, and to all other Committees—that this now provides an opportunity for them to raise those issues. Of course, through the Joint Committee, the Chairs have an opportunity to raise these issues as and when relevant select committees think it is appropriate. Of course, I would be very delighted to come before you on a very regular basis to tell you the very good news story about what is happening in decentralisation as it affects DCLG. Q6 Chair: So we are not having a decentralisation debate, or a decentralisation report? Mr Foster: The current intention of Government is not to produce a further report. That is pretty clear. Chair: Yes. It seemed to be a clear recommendation, and a sensible one. Mr Foster: I do think that one of the key roles of the select committees is to address this issue. It is very important across Government. Government has made it very clear that the decentralisation agenda is one we take very seriously. Holding Government Departments to account to look at that issue from time to time, as and when they think it is appropriate, is an important role of select committees. Q7 Chair: It would be very difficult to get a co-ordinated approach to that. We can obviously have you, as the responsible Minister in DLCG, before us. It is an impossible task to have Ministers from all the Departments in. 3 Mr Foster: I was suggesting that might be done on a Department-by-Department basis. Of course, it would be perfectly possible for the committee that brings all of the committee chairs together to raise this issue with the Prime Minister. Chair: That is some way away from the report we had here, which is helpful and useful to all committees because it draws everything together. Clearly, we hear what is being said, and we will reflect on that. Q8 James Morris: Greg, I was just wondering whether your definition of decentralisation is synonymous with localism. Are the two interchangeable terms? Greg Clark: Before I explain that, can I just give a comment on the report? My recommendations speak for themselves in terms of the debate in the report. There is also a suggestion in the report that the Cabinet Office, through the Structural Reform Plans that each Department has, reflects progress. At the expense of incurring the displeasure of my ministerial colleagues in other Departments, I would suggest that the Committee may want to consider inviting Cabinet Office Ministers in the future to look at decentralisation within Structural Reform Plans. To turn to Mr Morris’ point, there are various words used, such as localism, decentralisation, and indeed “the Big Society”. I have always thought of it in this way: we start from, in my view, an excessively centralised state. Too many decisions are taken in the centre. The process by which you move from a centralised state to a better state of affairs is decentralisation. It is the process of taking powers away from the centre and vesting them in communities. Localism is what I would describe as the ethos. In approaching this, the localist question should be: “What is the most local level that it would be appropriate to devolve the powers to?” If you like, decentralisation is the process, and localism is the ethos. Q9 James Morris: In the report, you quote three different examples of decentralisation in practice. There was one—I had not heard of this one—that was something called the Big Tree Plant.

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