Much more accountable way to work
Apr 11 2009 Kevin Rowan, Regional secretary of Northern TUC
AFTER what has seemed to some to be a somewhat protracted debate, the Government has decided at last to move ahead with the notion of Regional Select Committees.
It’s been almost two years since the Treasury-led ‘review of sub-national economic development and regeneration’ (SNR) was published. In that report there was much to ponder.
Among the key economic policy changes included in the SNR was an overdue effort to bring together the Regional Economic Strategy and the regional planning framework, the spatial strategy, which included transport strategy. This is clearly a very sensible approach.
A second, equally important development, is to both include local government more directly in establishing a new single regional strategy, local authority leaders now have to agree and sign off the strategy, and also place more responsibility on local government for delivering improved economic performance. The fact that local authorities need to produce an assessment of local economic and social need is an important precursor to those same organisations responding to that need. Most already do this, of course, but it will make these actions, as well as the analysis informing them, much more transparent and, therefore, much more accountable.
Regional assemblies have now been abolished. Established to ‘scrutinise RDAs, develop regional planning frameworks, including housing and transport, and be the voice of the region’’, assemblies have had critics from day one. The assemblies were always more democratic than given credit for.
Regional select committees do offer us a much more democratic and a potentially much more powerful opportunity to influence regional policy. There should be no doubt that the allocation of considerable sums of money at the regional and local levels have a dramatic and distinct impact upon the lives of every citizen in the region.
It is a fact that this happens with relatively little democratic participation or engagement, this is not unusual however, it is the case for most government policy. Despite the fact that regional select committees will not meet as frequently as ‘departmental ones’, despite the fact that the opposition parties have declined to participate, they could provide a real opportunity to seek to directly influence these relatively invisible institutions in a way which does reflect real participation and engagement – but only if the select committees operate on that inclusive and participative basis too.
