Lord Heseltine: Mayors could be 'world figures' but Whitehall is clinging to 'selfish' past structures over devolution

Former deputy prime minister Lord Heseltine has said “turkeys don’t vote for Christmas” when discussing why devolution to England’s regions has not gone further.

Addressing MPs this morning, Lord Heseltine said Yorkshire as a brand could be “so exciting as a concept” if leaders could agree - and government would grant - power to one person for the whole region.

And he said that mayors could be “world figures” and that he “can't think of a much better job in politics than to be the mayor of one of England's great cities”.

But he said: “Turkeys don't vote for Christmas, Everybody is clinging on to the past structure that suits their careers, their experience of working, and there simply is no will. The thing that is missing from this whole agenda is a government that is prepared to govern.”

His comments came during a session of the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee, which is examining English devolution.

But Lord Heseltine said there was “nothing new” about calls to push powers out of London.

“We need a government that is determined to get the job done,” he said. “And it's sad because here we are, without a white paper, no evidence of urgency in Whitehall. I hope we'll do something about it.”

West Yorkshire is due to elect its first metro mayor in May, after a £38m-a-year devolution deal was signed into law last week.

And discussions are ongoing with other areas as the Government has been insistent it was still committed to the devolution agenda.

But Lord Heseltine said: “The only way you're going to change any of this, frankly, is a government, with a prime minister that has a majority, who wants to get it done.

“That is, you look back over the last 50/60 years, and you can see that without that central decision making, you don't get results.

“If you leave it to all the component parts of local government, or the individual baronies of Whitehall, they all dig in for their own rather narrow, frankly selfish, perspective.”

While former Labour cabinet minister Professor John Denham - now an expert on English devolution - said he felt there was also a sense that the Government felt local leaders “can’t manage”.

He said: “When it thinks about how to get something done, it thinks we'll probably do it better if we do it ourselves.”

And he added: “The second problem is the centre doesn't now know how to deal with alternative centres of power. So even with the current mishmash of devolution, there are mayors, there are council leaders who hold significant local power.

“Whitehall doesn't really know how to deal with people who legitimately have power in their own right, they have the same problem with the devolved nations.”

And he said this was borne out in the “reluctance” to trust local public health teams with test and trace programmes at the beginning of the pandemic, or the high-profile row with Greater Manchester metro mayor Andy Burnham over coronavirus support.

“I think that there is a real problem in Whitehall that instinctively the main machine always says we don't think they will manage, we think we will do it better than they will,” he said.

“And that is pretty disastrous, and we've seen many examples of policy failing because of that.”

Prof Denham added: “I think that both parties put into Westminster many people whose initial instinct is to say ‘I want to go to Westminster to run things’.

“I don't think many parties produce many members of parliament who genuinely go into Westminster saying, ‘I wanted to devolve power’. It's part of the culture of our political system.”

Lord Heseltine said: “The challenge for this country is to provide the opportunities for subsequent generations to create the wealth that will enable them to fulfill their ambitions.

“To do that, we need to learn the lessons both of today and yesterday.

“London did not make this country, it was built to its preeminence in the days of the Industrial Revolution by the extraordinary divergence and ingenuity of the great cities of this country.

“Over the last 100 years, too much power has been centralised away from them, in London,

“We now need a great new partnership of our peoples, and in order to do that the central government will reform itself, in order to recognise the essential opportunities of devolution.”

A Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government spokesperson previously said: “We’re levelling up and empowering all areas of the country by devolving money, resources and control away from Westminster.

”We intend to bring forward the Devolution and Local Recovery White Paper in due course.”