Allister Hayman,
Regeneration & Renewal,
8 March 2010
Stockport and Trafford councils abstain from vote on whether to recommend Greater Manchester's pilot statutory city-region proposals.
Pioneering plans to tie the ten councils across Greater Manchester together as a pilot statutory city-region have been thrown into doubt after Stockport and Trafford councils abstained from a vote to push ahead with the deal.
Audio: Download the latest Ten Minute Briefing to listen to Dermot Finch of the Centre for Cities think-tank discuss this story
The leaders of Liberal Democrat-run Stockport and Conservative-led Trafford abstained from the vote to recommend the Greater Manchester city-region proposals at a meeting of the Association of Greater Manchester Authorities' executive board on 26 February. The other eight council leaders all voted for the city-region deal and will now recommend their councils approve the plans in separate council votes this month. Each council must separately vote in favour of the deal for it to be approved.
The city-region deal, first announced in last year's Budget, would see the ten councils banding together as a "combined authority" to pool resources over regeneration, skills, housing, transport and economic development.
Stockport Metropolitan Borough Council leader David Goddard said that he and his Trafford Metropolitan Borough Council counterpart Matt Colledge had abstained because of concerns about the deal's binding nature.
While he said they supported the thrust of the proposals, he wanted the legislation amended to allow member councils to give three years' notice of their withdrawal from the city-region. Under the current legislation passed in November, a member council can only withdraw with approval from the communities secretary. Goddard said that he did not want to sign up to a deal "he could not get out of".
Goddard said he was also concerned about the proposed simple majority voting system, which he said would have allowed the Greater Manchester congestion charge scheme to have proceeded, despite three boroughs opposing it. The congestion charge plan was rejected in a referendum in 2008. Goddard said he wanted to keep Agma's two-thirds majority voting system.
In response to Trafford's and Stockport's concerns, the city-region leaders agreed to allow a 7-3 majority vote for major strategic issues, with a simple majority used for issues of implementation, such as those to do with funding distribution. Agma leader Lord Smith said this meant that only the "toughest decisions", such as how the skills budget would be split between further education colleges, would be taken on a simple majority. "I don't think it's possible for those kind of decisions to be made with a two-thirds majority," he said.
He said Agma had also agreed that if a member council wanted to leave the city-region, the remaining councils would support that decision. "We're saying that if anybody wants to get out, nobody will stand in their way," Smith said.
But Goddard said these concessions may be insufficient to convince his council to vote for the plans. "I don't think the secretary of state would allow a council like Trafford, for example, with the Trafford Centre and the airport, to withdraw from the city-region if it wanted to," he said. "We need to be in control of our own destiny."
Speaking at the Agma meeting, Sir Richard Leese, leader of Manchester City Council, accused Stockport and Trafford of holding the other eight councils "to ransom". He said: "This is crunch time. It's time for authorities to decide whether they want to take part in this or not. If people don't want to be part of this, we have to look at the alternatives."
Leese told Regeneration & Renewal that this could mean disbanding Agma and proceeding with a new city-region partnership with either eight councils or with two other councils within the Greater Manchester economic area.
He would not be drawn on which other councils, but possibilities include Warrington and St Helens. He added that he considered Trafford's and Stockport's concerns had been "fully met" by Agma's concessions and it was not "remotely reasonable" for Stockport to insist on changes to primary legislation. "The law is the law, I'm afraid," he said.
But Goddard said such "threatening" language was "not helpful".
He said: "He's saying we must join the city-region or they'll disband Agma and form something else - basically we join or they smash what's left up out of spite. If he's threatening me now before I'm in the city-region, what will he do when I'm in it and I can't leave?"
OPINION: The councils want to wait for the election
Dermot Finch, director, Centre for Cities
Stockport and Trafford's decision to abstain is classic brinkmanship. The other eight are almost daring them not to join. Trafford and Stockport want to delay any deal until after the general election because the Tories and the Lib Dems are less committed to the idea of these formal, permanent arrangements. If the Tories win the election, the city-region could be signing up for something that doesn't actually end up with any more powers than anywhere else. But if Stockport and especially Trafford pull out it will be a setback, as a city-region without Trafford - with the Trafford Centre and the airport - might struggle for credibility.
