Deal or No Deal?

Liverpool City council have said the 'City Deal' that was on the table was the only deal to go for. Joe Anderson is putting a lot of effort into suggesting this deal to go direct to Mayoral election and bypassing a referendum was in the best interests of the city. He would say that, wouldn't he? But this leaves a lot of questions unanswered. Was it even a deal? What we're the other options?

Joe Anderson says the £130m City Deal could be worth £1billion. As far as I know he hasn't told us how yet. The City Deal was negotiated in private so all that is in public domain is the agreement in the form of a letter from Greg Clarke MP, Minister for Decentralisation and Cities. We don't know what other deals were on the table. For instance, we don't know what the City Deal for Liverpool would have been if the city would have chosen to take the referendum route.

It is worth noting that none of the other major cities that are constructing a City Deal felt that a direct election was in their best interest. Why is it that only Liverpool has chosen to go down the direction election route? Did the government construct the negotiations in such a way that they wanted to deny the people of Liverpool a choice? If so we should be told.

Or was it Liverpool City Council who constructed this arrangement? If the £130m deal was the best, what was the other deal? We can assume it was less, but how much less? £129m? £100m

Is there some conditionality to the City Deal that is not included in the agreement?  It is not clear if the new powers include the ability sign-off on large project or do they, as some are starting suggest, that sign-off will still be in the gift of various secretaries of state? Is this part of the deal?

A second issue that arises is just how much of the money and additional power is actually new?  The £75m in economic development appears to comprise all the money that was already available to the City, and certainly the powers are not new. Take the 'super fast broadband' money, this was already allocated to Liverpool under a deal from the Department for Culture, Media & Sport. A similar set up is true for the for the Housing element of the Mayoral Investment Board, which is simply a 'lease' type transfer of land assets from the Home & Community Agency, who will retain legal ownership of the assets and will continue to be the accountable body.

Two interesting omissions from the Mayor's powers will be education and health. Although the Mayor may have sufficient soft-power to bring people together, the increasing autonomy in the Education sector could mean that that integrating education into the economic development plan may be difficult. It is widely accepted that Liverpool has education attainment problems that contribute to the sluggishness of economic development. The Mayor will have some resources to build new schools, but even so half of these must be academies and therefore autonomous.

Health matters will also be dealt with by the new Health & Wellbeing Board. This will be run by local commissioning groups and representatives from the health sector. Its powers will be outside of the Mayor's remit. Again, the track record poor economic performance in Liverpool is related to health & wellbeing on both sides of the cause and symptom equation. Its within the Mayor's powers to work in partnership, but again this is significant area where the mayor has little influence.

There is also an area where there is potential source of conflict too. Although the Mayor will have economic development powers in Liverpool, it will be shared with the Local Economic Partnership, which is an arrangement that covers 6 boroughs. This is particularly important because some of the £130m is from retained business rates, but the mayor can only keep these if the LEP agrees. Its not clear what happens if the LEP doesn't agree.

There remains a lack of clarity over what the City Deal brings and what the alternatives were. Joe Anderson would do better by explaining how this deal was constructed and what were the alternatives. At the moment his triumphalism over the City Deal is looking a lot like the emperor's new clothes. I hope this is not the talking point for the election.