Commission meeting with Councillor Stephen Cowan, Leader, London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham
The Commission met with Councillor Stephen Cowan, Leader of the London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham, on 13 March as part of its inquiry into the empowerment of local government.
Councillor Cowan suggested that the central question to be asked is what’s local government for?
He said that national governments charged by an electorate to deliver an agenda of change often view devolution to local government as coming with some considerable risks.
He said some of that risk may be because of the variance in the performance of local authorities and some of this was a consequence of the wide variance in the professional capabilities of local government officials and councillors. He said it was also undoubtedly because of an institutionalised reluctance in central government to delegate power locally.
Councillor Cowan said that the first of those concerns was reasonable and one reason why the Office for Local Government (Oflog) was set up in an attempt to measure the performance of councils as the Audit Commission had done before. Councillor Cowan suggested that the government should go further than simply measuring performance by investing in the development and improvement of the professional capabilities of government officials. He said setting up a central school of government that brings people together across government to teach and share best practice might be a practical means of mitigating central government’s fears to delegate powers because it could be part of an ‘earned devolution’ settlement. Councillor Cowan made the point that all the best organisations in the world invest in the development of their people because it gives them a competitive advantage but training, coaching and development has long fallen by the wayside in much of local government.
Councillor Cowan said he believed it was incumbent on all levels of government to enhance people’s confidence in representative liberal democracy and that it was dangerous for our democracy to have power so centralised.
He said that at its best local government is good at long-term planning while being responsive, skilled and agile so it can quickly respond to people’s needs, hopes and concerns. And this should be a consideration for strengthening Britain’s democratic institutions.
Councillor Cowan said he thought that Britain had long suffered from short-termism and this was in part because of our centralised governance and economy.
He suggested that the elected leaders of towns, cities and regions are in many cases better placed to develop long term economic growth, education, public health, social care, and other plans for their areas than central government. He said that examples from across the world such as the German Länder and Stadtstaaten had indicated that devolved powers had produced long term benefits.
He commented on his experiences in Hammersmith and Fulham (H&F). The borough has the third highest land values in Britain so its tough approach to negotiating with developers was able to bring in much needed capital and this had allowed H&F to take measures such as setting up a new Law Enforcement Team or providing free breakfast for school children. He said local government finances should ensure that all councils have sufficient resources to efficiently deliver important outcomes and this is not currently the case.
He said instead of devolving powers to local democratic authorities, UK governments had prioritised non-democratic institutions such as quangos, development corporations and that the Prime Minister was flirting with charter cities – a product of neo-liberal think tanks and other corporate interest groups. He highlighted Michael Gove’s plan to establish a development corporation to “oversee a massive expansion of Cambridge” as an attack on local democratic government, unnecessary and extremely short-sighted.
Councillor Cowan cited H&F’s inclusive industrial strategy which launched in 2017 and which has since attracted upward of £6bn in growth investment – which is more than all of West London combined. He said much of it had gone directly to the White City Innovation District. Eighty five per cent of this investment is in H&F’s target areas of its STEMMM (science, technology, engineering, maths, medicines and media) strategy. This has created more than 8,200 new jobs. It has attracted global anchor organisations into H&F such as Novartis, L’Oréal, Airbus, ITV, The Royal College of Art, Synthace, Autolus and NATO.
Councillor Cowan said councils are not currently required to seek inclusive economic growth but his administration had made it an objective in 2014 and used the soft power associated with being leaders of place to persuade others to work with the council. He said H&F saw its role in the triple helix model as ‘Entrepreneurial Municipal Government’.
This approach to municipal entrepreneurialism meant that the local authority works to encourage investment. He said they helped L’Oréal find new offices, persuaded Blenheim Chalcot (a venture builder) to stay in H&F – and after H&F introduced them to Imperial College London, they built and now run Scale Space with Imperial which is home to dozens of STEMMM enterprises.
He said their biggest success came after Imperial College London bought some land and built some facilities in White City in the north of H&F. He said H&F had launched a partnership with Imperial in 2017, having approached Professor Alice Gast, who was President of Imperial, to pitch the idea of working with H&F to build an economic ecosystem around Imperial’s cutting edge research and development. Professor Gast immediately agreed and made H&F Imperial’s ‘anchor borough’.
Councillor Cowan said they had been lucky that Professor Gast had taught at Stanford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology because she knew how a plan to support university spinouts, attracting other anchor organisations and entrepreneurs could build economic super-clusters across Hammersmith & Fulham as they had in California and Massachusetts.
He said that up until that time, Imperial had existed in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea for 107 years but no attempt had been made to develop the area into a high growth economic eco-system.
Councillor Cowan said that there were several elements to H&F’s strategy which included attracting and working with anchor organisations, supporting entrepreneurs by providing affordable, flexible office and lab space but also helping people new to business to quickly gain the necessary skills and to avoid pitfalls which the Borough does with Upstream – a partnership with Imperial that facilitates advice and smarter access to investment.
He said he could do more if they had more powers over land development and education.
He said this economic success has brought a lot of international attention. In 2022 H&F signed a partnership agreement with Barcelona City Council’s 22@ innovation district. And the Borough is in the process of signing similar new partnerships with innovation districts in other liberal democracies – in Europe and Australia as it seeks to share knowledge, create networks between places and businesses, encourage trade and drive inward investment into H&F. The White City Innovation District is an invited founder member of the IASP’s innovation districts alliance.
Councillor Cowan said the council would like to have stronger powers and resources to acquire and develop land, much as they do in Barcelona.
He also said H&F have also been lobbying the Old Oak Development Corporation (ODPC) which boarders the Innovation District to engage with what’s going on in White City for almost a decade but to no avail. That development corporation argued that while it wishes H&F well with its economic strategy, they do not have the bandwidth to get involved despite controlling land development in a part of H&F that is to the immediate north of the innovation district. Councillor Cowan said the ODPC’s indifference is increasingly a hinderance.
Councillor Cowan said that as in Germany and elsewhere, H&F is working to align the work of local schools and educators to provide lifelong learning schemes but it has no formal powers to make that happen. So while recently H&F has partnered with the youth charity Onside to build its new £150m state-of-the-art youth facilities, West, it is having to persuade schools to organise extra-curricular activities that align with its local economic opportunities.
When questioned about the mistakes London Boroughs of Thurrock and Croydon had made, Councillor Cowan said he didn’t want councils to pretend to be businesses but he did want Councils to facilitate economic growth with local inclusive industrial strategies.
He said 9% of councils recently surveyed said they were likely to declare effective bankruptcy in the next financial year. So some councils had been pushed into acting as businesses by central government which had cut local government funding by around fifty per cent.
Councillor Cowan said the UK was almost unique amongst western liberal democracies in seeking quangos and development corporations as means of local government action over local democratically elected bodies. He said those organisations were always unrepresentative and lacked the imagination, responsiveness or flexibility to coordinate and lead comprehensive local change. He said Michael Gove has clearly not understood that in Cambridge.
Councillor Cowan said there is no good reason why British local government should be seen as less capable than local government in Germany, France, the United States or Australia.
He said that there should be several answers to the question: what's local government for? He said that it should be at the forefront of building a ‘good society’ locally that is environmentally sustainable and economically competitive in the world. That means giving it the necessary powers and resources to do that.
Some of Councillor Cowan’s recommendations included:
It should be recognised that some councils have been hollowed out in recent years and so the need to rebuild capabilities across local government is paramount if it is to take on new powers and responsibilities. As well as measuring council performance through Oflog, government should seek to improve it and extend best practice by training and developing and better qualifying local government officials.
Councils should be given powers and responsibilities to facilitate inclusive economic growth and this should increase greater powers on land development, education/skills and tackling climate change through retrofitting and green energy schemes. These measures fit with councils’ current role as place makers and home builders.
Financial settlements should be for at least three years and preferably five years to enable long term stable planning. Greater consideration should be given to local means of raising money including road taxes, sales levy, hotel taxes.
Business rates need to be reformed as they tax the space used by a business to discourage businesses expansion and damage retail and hospitality businesses reliant on space.
If the system of council tax is to be continued then councils need to be able to vary the bands.
He said it was damaging that councillors had been removed from the local government pension scheme. There should be a national review of councillors renumeration as many are now full time and it is an important job in our democracy.