Eric Pickles: Bureaucracy is stifling regeneration of our cities
It is hard not to be impressed by the brilliant achievements of the Victorians. The philanthropic men who built proud cities like Liverpool, Manchester, Bradford and Leeds. Armed with a combination of vision and civic pride, they built vibrant, beautiful and thriving communities — housing, employing and educating the people who lived within them.
Yet I wonder how those visionaries would have achieved what they did if bogged down with the bureaucracy, lack of accountability and remoteness of decision-making that now faces the people trying to regenerate those same cities.
Over the past 10 years, the government approach of micromanagement, targets, tickboxes and ringfencing has stifled the flair and innovation that built our cities in the first place. Ministers' relentless dragging of power from local, elected representatives to unaccountable and remote quangos has bought about a culture where decision-making is slow, accessing funding is complicated and bureaucratic, and the priorities and concerns of the people actually living there are ignored or overlooked.
Why, for example, are there more than 50 different funding streams for regeneration? Why, when more than £10bn is being spent on regeneration, is less than 10% of it channelled through the local councils elected to lead those cities?
Take a look, for instance, at the government's much trumpeted Pathfinders scheme. To date, it has spent £29m demolishing more than 12,000 homes, with another 9,000 due to be demolished over the next three years. Irrespective of local views, town halls that fail to meet the arbitrary targets for bulldozing homes face the threat of savage cuts to their funding. The sheer scale of these demolitions — including Victorian terraces — is environmentally, socially and financially wasteful.
If we are to breathe fresh life into our cities, and provide the kind of living space that families actually want to live in, we need to take drastic action.
We have to bring strong local leadership to replace the current, emasculated system by doing away with the remote regional bureaucracy. Instead of regional quangos, local government should be leading the renaissance of our cities. The first step should be to scrap the whole tier of regional planning that — on top of local and national planning policies — has created a quagmire of complexity.
We wish to see town halls take more control of their own finances, and to work alongside other local authorities to develop their own solutions, not have them imposed by regional bureaucrats or from an air-conditioned office in Whitehall.
And there is one more thing we think must happen — we must bring back the kind of vision and civic pride we saw in those far-sighted Victorians. To create dynamic local leadership and to attract high-calibre individuals, we believe that directly elected executive mayors for top-tier authorities is the best governance model. Almost every major city in the world outside the UK has a directly elected executive mayor, driving forward regeneration and change, so why should our cities not have the same chance? In this way, we hope to free our cities to develop and grow once more into the thriving, exciting centres they once used to be.
Eric Pickles is shadow secretary of state for communities and local government