The TaxPayers' Alliance - Campaign

Will the RDA's go the way of the Dodo?

Stewart Jackson MP, Conservative Shadow Minister for Communities and Local Government, has an interesting piece over on ConservativeHome today. The article provides an excellent run-down and critique of the current proposals for yet more transfer of powers to regional quangos , including the establishment of "unelected economic and transport quangos" which will be "empowered to impose "local charging schemes", in the form of congestion taxes, road pricing and workplace parking taxes."

He also makes the astute observation, previously described on the blog in various cases, that the GOvernment:

have no wish to learn the lessons of the emphatic "no" vote in the North East regional referendum in 2004 and the more recent overwhelming rejection of congestion charging in Greater Manchester before Christmas.

Instead, the underlying message is "if the system doesn't deliver our policies at local level as a result of the voters' decisions - let's keep changing the system till it does!" In short, an arrogant disregard for the autonomy and legitimacy of local democracy and decision making.

It is encouraging in itself to hear the Opposition making these criticisms, as it at least heavily implies they would do things differently. Hopefully we will soon start to find out some concrete measures that they will put in place were they to form a Government to start delivering real power back to the people. Jackson does dangle one, tantalising hint before the end of his article:

Labour's Stalinist quango state of unelected party elites is not the way to achieve these aims.

In contrast, we'll scrap the whole tier of regional planning.

Is that a pledge to scrap the Regional Development Agencies? I certainly hope that it is and that it will be made clearer and more solid in the near future.

As our research in August and then December last year showed, the RDAs are wasteful, self-congratulatory bodies that produce very little other than jobs for themselves and a good deal of hot air. The media and public reaction to our reports demonstrates that there is a strong public appetite for abolishing them entirely and giving their powers to local, democratically elected representatives - real localism, rather than sham regionalism.

If you liked what you read here, you can join the campaign against RDAs and other wasteful quangos by joining the TaxPayers' Alliance for free here.

Instead, the underlying message is "if the system doesn't deliver our policies at local level as a result of the voters' decisions - let's keep changing the system till it does!" In short, an arrogant disregard for the autonomy and legitimacy of local democracy and decision making.

Regional committees are a fig leaf

Iain Dale has got it bang on over on his blog regarding the newly proposed Regional Select Committees. The idea, which is to have a Select Committee to oversee each Regional Development Agency, would certainly mean the quangos were slightly more accountable, but frankly the most democratic option would be to ditch the RDAs altogether.

Every time the regionalisation agenda has been put to the public they have rejected it overwhelmingly, most notably in the North East Assembly referendum in 2004. Instead of doing what people want and ditching the concept of artificial, top-down regional government, though, the Government have at every stage tried to weasel round public objections to the project.

2004: Directly elected assemblies sunk in North East referendum. Victory for anti-regionalisation campaigners!
...Government brazenly interprets the result as a vote of support for unelected regional government and vowed to press on with RDAs and unelected assemblies.

2007: After of bad press the Government announced that the unelected Regional Assemblies were to be scrapped. Victory for anti-regionalisation campaigners!
...Assembly powers are to be transferred to totally unaccountable Regional Development Agencies.

Now the Government is proposing both Regional Select Committees and Grand Committees of a region's MPs to whom the RDAs will have to report. Particularly given our research that shows the RDAs have had little or no benefit despite the billions of pounds they spend every year, surely it would be better to scrap them altogether. In common with so many other quangos, no-one wants them, they cost billions and they achieve hardly anything.

Creating this new set of committees would simply be an expensive and complex way of Parliament trying to compensate for a deeply undemocratic state of affairs. Why should Parliament have to bend to the unaccountable structures of the State to keep up a pretence of proper democratic control? It would be far better instead to change the structure of Government to create genuine democracy and accountability.

Opening up the secret Senate

Good news from Hampshire today - the "Hampshire Senate", which looks remarkably like a county-wide replica of the failed regional assemblies, has buckled under pressure from the TPA and the public and has agreed to hold its meetings in public rather than in secret.

I'm far from alone in being naturally suspicious of any group of politicians and quangocrats who decide things could be run much better by self-selected groups of people in unaccountable organisations meeting - and spending taxpayers' money - behind closed doors. They have less need to produce policies the public like, they can spend money like water and at the end of the day if they fail the public are far less able to hold them to account.

The Hampshire Senate has already proved the second of these principals right after its first meeting was initially planned to be an all-expenses overnight stay in a plush hotel. Hopefully this new openness, which should be backed up with fully published minutes, accounts, expense receipts and suchlike, will deter that kind of thinking in future, but the Senate is still far from a good idea.

For a start, it's a duplication of another sub-regional body in the area, the Partnership for Urban South Hampshire (which should also be abolished, I might add). Even the Government have already said they are interested in PUSH, not the Senate.

What's more, why should this body and the people who sit on it have any say over the wide range of areas they are set to discuss?

Apparently the Senate wants to tackle climate change, drug abuse, public spending methods and teenage pregnancy to start off with. These issues are important but all are dealt with by huge numbers of departments, civil servants, quangos and other bodies already - what will the Senators be bringing to the table?

The mission as it has been laid out so far smacks of people enjoying the title of Senator and adding to their sense of self-importance by taking on mighty issues irrespective of whether it's a good use of their time and our money. Presumably they'll later move on to raising the Titanic, World Peace and exactly why belly button fluff is blue.

There is no good reason why representatives of SEEDA, the failed Regional Development Agency, or the local military commander should have a vote on teenage pregnancy, sex education, climate change and congestion measures. Arguably a big problem surrounding public policy in this area as it stands is that too much power is already in the hands of unaccountable bureaucrats and inexperienced politicians. That power should be given back to the people and civil society, not gathered at even more expense into yet another layer of government.

The news that the Senate is to be open and on the record is welcome - but that openness will hopefully serve to inform the people of Hampshire clearly and immediately that this is a pointless project that at best will cost money and produce hot air. At worst it will further complicate the tangled web of public sector initiatives and pile more chaos and confusion into a State that needs urgent simplification.

Thanks for reading.  If you agree with our campaign for lower taxes and want to know more about the TPA, you can register online, completely free of charge, here.

ONE North East has no defence

Further to the devastating findings of our report on Regional Development Agencies, a lot of our supporters have been writing to their MP, council or RDA to demand that the RDAs be scrapped. One supporter in the North East wrote to Dari Taylor, MP for Stockton South, about the issue.

Instead of responding with her own view on why £15 billion has been squandered on a clutch of agencies that have had little or no appreciable impact on development, Ms Taylor wrote to ONE North East, the local RDA, to get their answer.

Unsurprisingly, the Chief Executive of the RDA, Alan Clarke (not that Alan Clarke) is utterly convinced that the RDA is key to the survival of jobs in the region - not least, of course, his own £187,694 a year.

Here is his letter (apologies for the quality of page 2):
Download one_north_east_page_1.pdf
Download one_north_east_page_2.pdf

In his letter, Mr Clarke says he wants to "respond to [the TPA's] claims and outline our achievements". It may not come as a surprise that he then goes on to do an awful lot of the latter without once trying to engage with, debate or even question or findings. It's a lot more convenient to sidestep hard evidence about your failures than it is to argue with it, apparently.

His argument defending ONE North East seems to be based on the following:

i) "In the nine years since it was established to lead economic growth in the region, ONE North East has consistently met or exceeded its performance targets."

Mr Clarke seems to have mixed up actual success on the ground with ticking Government boxes. Our report never sought to suggest that the RDAs aren't smug about themselves - far from it - rather it points out that you can tick all the boxes in the world but they won't actually help people if your approach is fundamentally flawed. The RDAs are unaccountable, unelected and almost unsackable, and the result is exactly this attitude - they don't have to demonstrate any improvement in reality to the people paying the bills just as long as other unaccountable bureaucrats agree they're working hard.

ii) "Our investment is tightly targeted at business, people and place..."

What does that actually mean?

iii) "The latest statistics for the last financial year show that the regional development agency helped create more than 17,000 new jobs in the North East and assisted over 23,000 firms to improve their performance."

He neglects to mention, of course, that these are ONE North East's own figures, produced by them to justify their own existence. They are shall we say unlikely to write to the Government with the truth, which is "Yeah, really sorry but we're not quite sure what we have achieved actually..." The RDAs are  extremely reluctant to publish the definition of what they mean by "creating jobs" or "attracting businesses". More often than not, according to businesses themselves, they are claiming the credit for writing irrelevant letters to businesses that are creating jobs anyway. The lack of any appreciable improvement, as we discovered, over time compared to the regions' performance before the RDAs existed is a testament to this paper-thin justification.

iv) "Importantly...there is strong support for One North East across the business, public and voluntary sectors."

Really? Where is this strong support? When I debated the issue on BBC Radio Newcastle in August one of the guests was a businesswoman who had received direct aid from ONE North East and even she said she was worried about what they were up to, how they spent taxpayers' money and the fact that they operate behind closed doors. A lot of councillors are furious that so much money and power intended for local development is allocated to unaccountable quangocrats. Even the Government have just slashed RDA funding. Support seems pretty thin on the ground to me.

All in all, as Terry-Thomas would have said, "What an absolute shower." Do keep writing to RDAs, MPs, Ministers and newspapers about the RDA rip-off and let us know what response you get. This vacuous reply shows we've really got them on the spot, and these bureaucratic behemoths should be humanely put down as soon as possible.

Mixed messages from the Tories on regional government

There has been some speculation in recent days that regional assemblies are about to be abolished.     The faux-oversight they were supposed to offer the vast regional development agencies was always a sham, and now it seems that Gordon Brown has had enough of them.  In yesterday’s Times, the move to abolish them – and reportedly to transfer their remit over regional planning and housing decisions back to Whitehall as part of Brown’s policy of creating “eco-towns” and 3 million new homes – exposed a contradiction in the policy of the opposition Conservative Party.  In fact, the opening paragraph required something of a double-take:

“Gordon Brown’s plans to scrap regional assemblies and hand their powers to other regional quangos were criticised by the Conservatives last night who claimed that they were undemocratic. Eric Pickles, the Shadow Communities Secretary, said that Labour was trying to remove the key tier of opposition to its plans to build hundreds of thousands of homes in the South and South East” - Times

Since when was a decision by an elected Government to abolish an unelected quango undemocratic?  That said, if it is only a prelude to more powers being centralised in the hands of bureaucrats in Whitehall, then sham democracy has something over no democracy at all.  But is that really where the Conservatives are coming from?  After years of opposition to the principle of regional government, do they now see regional assemblies – especially those in the South with majority Conservative representation – as a bulwark (however limited) against socialist planning diktats that Brown would otherwise be able to ram through?  If so, this is quite a major u-turn.  After all, in 2002, Eric Pickles described himself as a “born again localist”:

"We want to give a bigger emphasis to local government, rather than just chasing John Prescott and his six ministers around. I took the job on after Stephen Byers' resignation. For us, local government is the key - it's the building blocks by which we'll get back to Westminster. I've spent the summer talking to local authorities, and in Tyne Tees, for example, 60% of people don't want a regional assembly. People there don't want to be controlled by Newcastle. Ditto for Yorkshire - the people of North Lincolnshire hate the idea of being run by Leeds and Bradford."

If this is still his view, why should people in Dartford, or Dover or Tunbridge Wells, have their views overruled by unelected South East of England Regional Assembly (SEERA) members – of any party colour – in Guildford? Later in the same article, Mr Pickles hedges on the planning subject but also replays the Conservative Party’s conventional message about regional government:

“The regional assemblies are unelected, unaccountable and unwanted. But the musical chairs of passing their functions from one regional quango to another will do nothing to give local communities a greater say on where new homes should go, nor speed up the planning system.”

In other words – "the system is crap but it’s working for us at the moment so we may as well play ball and do our best to annoy Brown".  How any of this fits with the party’s preference for more new housing to help first time buyers is anyone’s guess.  Or indeed how this national policy – insofar as it is one – is going to go down with local Conservative councils who have been some of the most vehement opponents to any new housing, however much it is needed (these “Nimby” councils incidentally, would of course in Pickles’s eyes be the preferred recipients of any planning powers redistributed if regional government was ever abolished).

These are all details that seem to undermine the Conservative position on planning and local democracy.  It is clear that on this, like so much else, the Conservatives don’t really know what they think, even when it isn’t hard to know what argument plays best with the public.  We all know that regional assemblies are unpopular (and they seem to know they are – it is quite satisfying to think that SEERA felt the need to dedicate an entire page of its glossy website to justify itself…), and the only time the public were given an opportunity to have a say in the North East in November 2004 they were also resoundingly rejected as a concept. 

Despite this, some Conservatives seem to have decided regional assemblies are good for something and many have now built new careers for themselves inside regional government (the head of the UK delegation to the European Committee of the Regions is a Tory Cllr). It isn’t unreasonable to say that Conservatives who sit on regional assemblies (they have done so for years), now have a clear vested interest in retaining them – and even increasing their powers (unlike UKIP MEPs in the EU).  Some Conservatives councillors sitting on regional assemblies have already argued for this – even if always as an alternative to losing these powers entirely back to Whitehall.  From the same Times article:

"Keith Mitchell, the Tory chairman of the South East England Regional Assembly, said: “The assembly gives elected local councillors the power to make decisions on housing, transport, the economy and the environment that are too big for a single local authority to make. Without the assembly these decisions would be made by quangos or remote civil servants.”

Most UKIP MEPs have to hold their noses when they spend time in Strasbourg or Brussels.  Conservatives on regional assemblies seem to actively enjoy their new power and status (and expenses allowance). 

All this is pretty inconsistent and the question now is: would a future Conservative government actually  reverse the costly and bureaucratic regional government agenda that has taken over planning and regeneration in the last ten years, or would they just settle for being the majority party in charge and therefore in a position to use them as a tool for their own ends?  If Brown doesn’t actually abolish them, are regional assemblies and development agencies (where the real money is), here to stay?  Like Bank of England independence, tax credits and the minimum wage, is regional government a permanent part of the Blairite inheritance that will be as difficult to abolish as the national curriculum in schools?  Earlier last week Alan Duncan, the Shadow Business Secretary suggested not, but if you were going to scrap the RDAs, there would be no need for the regional assemblies at all.

We sincerely hope that the Conservatives iron-out the contradictions on their regional government policy, as much on democratic as on cost grounds.  Regional government is a key pillar of our bloated quango state that drains public money at a terrifying rate.  The best part of £3 billion is filtered down to these corporate bureaucracies every year and as a result, we have created well-paid local technocratic elites who represent nothing and no-one except the worst examples of our political class (they are typically unqualified, lazy, junket-loving and incompetent…).  But there is also the more important democratic argument. You are either in favour of more local control – which means devolution to the lowest possible level as the Direct Democracy group favour – or you are not.  Regional government is not and never has been localism and it doesn’t become any better just because your mates are running the show. 

Pickles and co. should commit to a clear manifesto pledge to scrap all vestiges of regional government, including regional development agencies and instruct all those Conservative councillors currently sitting on regional assemblies to resign.  Those Conservatives who then chose not to, would find themselves in conflict with the popular declared policy of the Party leadership, and also on the wrong side of a people vs. politicians divide.  In today’s political environment – not a very comfortable place to be.