UKREiiF | Reed on devolution: ‘We’ve got to drive it faster’

“This is only the start on devolution,” secretary of state Steve Reed told Place on Wednesday, in an exclusive interview after his stage session with Pat Ritchie at the Leeds-based investment conference.

Reed was referencing the government’s push to create City Investment Funds, more devolved authorities, and enhance fiscal devolution deals to give greater financial controls to mayors. He praised the work that had been done but insisted there was more to come.

“We’ve got to drive it faster,” he told Place, regarding devolution.

“Regions need to be able to keep more of their own resources, so they can invest in their region,” he said. “They know far better than Whitehall what needs to happen in their region.

“People far away are never going to know a place as well as the businesses and politicians who are in that region, so we have to shift power out of Whitehall if we want to rebalance the country and open up opportunity everywhere.”

Regional inequalities have helped create the current volatile political atmosphere, according to Reed.

“We’ve got in the UK one of the biggest economies in the world and yet it has some of the poorest regions in Europe – that cannot continue,” Reed told Place.

“It is, for me, the fundamental reason why there is so much anger in politics: people are not able to access the opportunities that they want for their kids,” Reed said.

“We have to address those regional inequalities. That is the approach that the government is taking, with investment into those parts of the country that have been starved a bit for so long.”

Reed was not the only politician calling for more devolution this week – that rallying cry was a key element of Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham as he launched his campaign to become MP for Makerfield.

Dan Tomlinson MP, exchequer to the secretary to the Treasury, spoke at Pagabo’s Pavilion at UKREiiF on Wednesday. Credit: Place Media Group

To that end, the government’s move to further fiscal devolution was cited by exchequer to the secretary to the Treasurer, Dan Tomlinson MP, as something that needs to be done speedily.

“I am really blood impatient too on this,” Tomlinson told a crowd at the Pagabo Pavilion at UKREiiF on Wednesday afternoon.

“This work that we’re doing on the fiscal devolution is one of the most important bits of work that I’m doing as a tax minster,” he said.

Increasing productivity in cities outside of London to match their European counterparts would add £80bn a year to the economy, Tomlinson said.

In the chancellor Rachel Reeves’s Mais Lecture, she had announced a push to have mayoral combined authorities retain a slice of national tax revenue – the precise tax or taxes this would come from is still being decided.

Tomlinson emphasised that this was not about increasing existing taxes, but about redistributing them.

“This isn’t about giving mayors the ability to increase that tax, but it is about giving them that long-term funding stream that they know they’ll have,” he said.

“The plan isn’t to roll this out everywhere, all at once, overnight once we’ve announced it at the Budget,” he added later. “We want to make sure that we get it right. It’s a really significant change to the way in which regional government is funded.”

To that end, long-established mayoral combined authorities, such as Greater Manchester and Liverpool City Region, are likely to benefit first, with the programme rolled out to newer devolved authorities in due course.

As for when all this will happen, Tomlinson refused to commit to a set timeframe. He did say more would be revealed in the Autumn Budget and that the process would not languish in consultation for ages.

Reed and Tomlinson were not the only government officials to make promises around delivery at UKREiiF. the chancellor assured the convention’s audience that the government was “just getting started”.