Tag: Greater Manchester

ON ILKLEY MOOR BAR DEVO BILL.

 

Jim McMahon, the new Labour MP for Oldham West is right to express his “deep unease” about the Northern Powerhouse. However it is the only game in town right now and just over the Pennines from his town the pressure is on Leeds City Region to get a similar deal to Greater Manchester’s.

Last week a conference in Leeds frankly discussed the difficulties involved. The background is that there are broadly two rival views on the way forward for Yorkshire. One believes that the county has a brand to die for and needs a single area covering West, North and East Yorkshire. Sheffield and South Yorkshire already have a deal. The other vision is for a Leeds City Region which includes Harrogate, Craven, York and Selby. The argument here is that the North’s best hope is in harnessing the energy of its cities whilst the more rural areas take a slower path to devolution.

Tom Riordan, the able Chief Executive of Leeds City Council is in no doubt he needs the power and resources devolution can bring. The city is without a tram system or adequate flood defences for instance. He is not obsessed with rivalry with Manchester pointing to major differences between the two cities. Leeds is five times as large geographically with large communities nearby like Bradford and Huddersfield. He thinks press reports of infighting are exaggerated but acknowledges there is a problem with the government’s insistence on an elected mayor. The concept was rejected for the City of Leeds three years ago and it is an arguable point whether Chancellor George Osborne can say he has a General Election mandate to insist that his mayoral model covers a wider geographical area.

Riordan insists he is not anti the Yorkshire concept pointing to the county wide cooperation that brought the Tour de France to the county with such brilliant success but the city versus county argument remains fierce. Peter Box, the chair of the West Yorkshire Combined Authority thinks the county has four distinct economies and with South Yorkshire having already gone its own way, the Greater Yorkshire model is flawed. This is contested by Lord Haskins, the former boss of Northern Foods and now chair of the Humber Local Enterprise Partnership. He is a firm believer that the Yorkshire brand has worldwide recognition and should have governance structures to match to promote the county particularly for business in Europe.

While the rest of the county struggles to get its act together it is interesting to look at what is happening in Sheffield. Events there may portend issues that may arise in the Liverpool City and Greater Manchester regions as elections approach for an elected mayor next year. A row has broken out over whether the elected mayor for the whole city region has a veto over all matters within the city itself.

It is also worthy of note that each of these devolution deals is different. Sheffield’s City Region mayor has not been combined with the Police and Crime Commissioner nor could they get vital powers over 16 to 18 year old skills powers. This is why MP Jim McMahon is deeply uneasy about the devolution project which lacks a national framework and coherence.

 

OLDHAM BY ELECTION CHALLENGE FOR LABOUR AND UKIP.

 

The first eagerly awaited test of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party is likely to come next month. Party chiefs are likely to move quickly to fill the vacancy caused by the death of Michael Meacher. They won’t want UKIP to gain momentum (sorry to use that word, labour moderates) in a constituency perilously close to Heywood and Middleton where Nigel Farage’s outfit nearly beat them in a by election a year ago.

How will the Labour voters in this deprived working class seat react to Jeremy Corbyn. They have been content to elect Michael Meacher twelve times with thumping majorities and he was always on the left of the party being a close ally of Tony Benn when Labour was in a very similar position to where it is now in the 1980’s.

The choice of Labour’s standard bearer will be very interesting. On a personal level the leader of Oldham Council Jim McMahon has an important decision to make. He is a rising star and leads the Labour group on the Local Government Association. He is spoken of as a possible candidate for elected mayor of Greater Manchester in 2017. Unless a Labour government is elected and he rises to Cabinet rank, he would be more likely to have real power up here rather than at Westminster. McMahon may not want it or might not be selected. Momentum is the new Corbynista activist group in the Labour Party. Moderate MPs think there agenda is to start deselecting people who don’t agree with the Labour leader. How influential will they be in the choice of the Oldham candidate?

UKIP do face an uphill task in the seat. Meacher had a majority of nearly 15,000. It has a large south Asian population and the party is preoccupied with infighting about which pressure group is going to leader the EU Out campaign. Nevertheless a divided Labour Party with a poor candidate, an anti Corbyn backlash and a low turnout could produce a surprise.

I referred to Michael Meacher’s dozen victories between 1970 and this May but he began with a defeat. In 1968 the Wilson Labour government was deeply unpopular. So much so that Manchester City Council was controlled by the Conservatives! In a by election in this seat that summer the Conservatives won the seat beating the young Michael Meacher.

We do seem to be getting more than our fair share of by elections in the North West. This will be the fifth since 2010. Oldham East went to the polls after Phil Woolas was unseated in 2011. Tony Lloyd’s resignation to become Police and Crime Commissioner for Greater Manchester sent Manchester Central voters to the polls in 2012 and the deaths of Paul Goggins and Jim Dobbin caused further by elections in Wythenshawe and Heywood in 2014.

GOVERNMENT DECEPTION OVER RAIL PLANS

WHEN DID MINISTERS KNOW?

Questions remain unanswered about the decision to “pause” the electrification of the rail line from Leeds to Manchester. Passengers facing the prospect of overcrowded and slow trains between these major cities well into the next decade deserve to know how they were deceived in the run up to the election. We all deserve to know because connectivity is meant to be at the heart of the Northern Powerhouse.

The people who should be answering the questions have gone to ground. I listened to an excellent report on our rail problems recently. It was BBC Radio Four’s File On Four produced in Salford. They were investigating the Leeds-Manchester fiasco along with the recent chaos at London Bridge and the fact that new trains can’t be used at Bristol Temple Meads because the carriages are too long not to scrape on the curved platform. About ten times the reporter, Allan Urry, had to say nobody had been prepared to face his questions.

In relation to the decision not to go ahead with the electrification of the Leeds to Manchester rail line, some interesting facts are emerging which appear to show that Ministers and rail chiefs knew fine well before the General Election that the project wasn’t going ahead.

There has been a long running war of words between Network Rail (NR) and the Office of Rail Regulation (ORR) which approves all NR’s investment plans. Before he moved to head up HS2 in the spring of last year, NR’s Chief Executive David Higgins was scathing about ORR’s approach of requiring him to do far more for far less money. Last year Higgins claimed NR was being asked “to deliver too much, too quickly” and the prospect of achieving ORR’s targets was “unrealistic.” So I doubt if David Higgins was surprised when the Transport Secretary paused the electrification.

We now move forward to last September when NR’s inability to deliver became clearer. Transport for Greater Manchester have told a source of mine that the franchise invitation to tenders were delayed by two months once the Department for Transport and Rail North (a body of councils and MPs) became aware of NR’s difficulty. Bidders were instructed to assume that TransPennine electrification would not be completed during the franchise term of TransPennine Express and Northern Rail. This indicates that a year ago Network Rail were saying that the train companies should assume that rail electrification would not take place until around 2024 when bidding for their franchise renewals.

Now can I introduce you to the little known MP for Harrogate, Andrew Jones. He used to chair the Transport Secretary Patrick McLoughlin’s Electrification Task Force which has now had a spectacular power failure. Its purpose was to advise McLoughlin on how schemes could be accelerated. Andrew Jones biography on the Department of Transport website says he provided “advice on the next steps for electrification of railways in the North of England”.

So are we to assume that Mr Jones didn’t advise McLoughlin in March that electrification wasn’t going to happen when he was chairing a task force with the specific purpose of advising on electrification? Mr Jones has now been promoted to a junior ministerial position in the Department of Transport.

I’ve given Patrick McLoughlin a lot of stick in this blog so I leave you with a suggestion that has been made to me. The government may be looking at a vastly more ambitious tunnel option instead of electrifying the existing line. If so, why don’t they level with us?

Follow me at www.jimhancock.co.uk

FED UP WITH THE ELECTION ALREADY?

 

 

FOUR MONTHS OF THIS?

 

As people lie in ambulances waiting for treatment, the sound of squabbling politicians rings in their ears.

 

If it’s not the NHS, it’s the economy. We got four or five rebuttal and counter rebuttal documents from the Conservatives and Labour on Monday about each other’s spending plans.

 

The electorate is already mightily disillusioned with the Westminster game. Four months of this will not just have them turning off in droves, it will make them angry.

 

Political reporters have already been overusing the phrase “the election campaign got under way today”, when we know that there will be multiple launches around the spring party conferences and when Parliament is dissolved. Oh for the return of the short sharp campaign. There is a view that people generally form a view two years out from an election. It is difficult to achieve significant changes in opinion amid the sound and fury of the last few weeks before polling day. To inflict this early period of claim and counter claim on a weary electorate is a mistake.

THE YEAR AHEAD FOR BUSINESS.

 

For business, the approaching election means the thing it hates most, uncertainty. The possibility of a change of government might mean that investment plans will be put on hold. This is compounded by the prospect that forming a new government might take weeks and involve multiple parties. Discerning what that will all mean for taxation and business incentives is very difficult, hence the Prime Minister comes up with his plea for continuity under the Conservatives.

 

But away from politics there are a number of other business related questions for the year ahead. How much longer are the workers going to settle for 1% pay rises and zero hours contracts? With unemployment dropping and the economy improving, are we going to see more robust demands for pay rises? These may particularly come in the private sector where there is some evidence of skills gaps developing. Public sector workers may be less likely to take part in a wage push because remorseless cuts are set to continue whoever is in power.

 

AN UNCERTAIN WORLD.

 

Uncertainty at home and uncertainty abroad. The slump in the oil price in 2014 took everyone by surprise. Whilst it provides everyone with lower costs in the short term, what it is telling us about the health of the world economy is another matter.

 

The American economy is surging ahead but the Euro zone’s performance continues to be an embarrassment for those of us who want it to succeed.

The Russian economy is tanking because of the oil price and sanctions, but how will Vladimir Putin react? Will he bow to the pressure or stoke up the fear that Mother Russia is under attack from the West.

 

A few years ago China’s rapid expansion sent raw material prices soaring. Growth has slowed. What effect will that have on China’s policy of increasingly investing in western infrastructure? Questions are being asked for instance about progress with the development of Wirral and Liverpool Waters.

 

A NEW MAGNA CARTA.

 

As we mark the 800th anniversary of this shake up in English governance, it would be nice if we could take a fundamental look at how we are ruled from parish council to the House of Lords.

 

It doesn’t look as if that is going to happen. Instead we will have to concentrate on incremental change. In that respect the question for this year will be whether Leeds, Sheffield and even Liverpool will be getting the Greater Manchester devolution deal, with or without elected City Region mayors.