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A Game of two halves
The Guardian - 2 February
2004
As a former local government minister, David Curry has the
credentials to be a serious thorn in Labour's side. Peter Hetherington
meets a Tory 'liberal' on the attack
A few months ago, David Curry's political future was resting on a knife-edge.
The executive of the Conservative association in Skipton and Ripon was
again trying to de-select a centrist, pro-European MP with old liberal
values and a growing commitment to internationalism. "I won by about
15-8," Curry recalls.
Suddenly, with the emergence of a new Tory leader late last year, Curry
was brought in from the cold to shadow John Prescott's Office of the Deputy
Prime Minister - the rather grand title for the department of local government
and the regions - with Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland thrown into
the portfolio. For a Euro-sceptic Michael Howard, it might have seemed
a smart move to broaden the base of a slimmed-down shadow cabinet, while
bringing welcome relief for a sometimes beleaguered MP who entered parliament
in 1987 after eight years as an MEP.
"My promotion has been a disaster for my executive," Curry
jokes. "My job in the shadow cabinet saved me. They'll have to abandon
their annual attempts to de-select me." But this was more than a
token gesture by a new Conservative leader seemingly determined to cultivate
that elusive centre ground in British politics occupied by one-nation
Tories such as Curry. More than most in Howard's new team, Curry knows
the local government, housing and planning patch well.
Thanks to a spell as a minister under John Gummer in the old Department
of the Environment before the 1997 general election, he understands the
complexities of local government finance, and housing policy, better than
most ministers. He knows the ways of Whitehall, retaining a healthy cynicism
for some of its workings.
He also knows the urbane minister for local and regional government,
Nick Raynsford. By Curry's admission, they get on "very well",
and Raynsford returns the compliment. Curry recalls: "Nick was my
equivalent when I was local government minister and, quite frankly, when
he got up to make his first speech as a minister I knew what was coming
next - "No government can afford not to take local government seriously",
and all that. It was the same speech I might have made, no doubt written
by the same civil servants - and it was wonderful. All governments are
tarred with the same brush. This is what I find wonderfully entertaining."
By that he means that, either in opposition or in the optimistic first
months of government, Labour and the Tories proclaim the virtues of local
democracy - only to rule by central diktat, and then intervene directly
in town and county halls when subsequent headlines suggest that local
government might be damaging the standing of the party in power. "I
remember how often we were criticised by Labour for 'crude and universal
capping' [of council budgets]," Curry says with a smile. "What's
happening at the moment? Here we are - Nick Raynsford threatening 31 councils
on the basis of press reports. Wonderful! I am hoping we may be able to
make a break with that - allow diversity, make a thousand flowers bloom."
But Curry, who will prove more of a thorn in the side of John Prescott
than his predecessor - the hapless David Davis - is a realist. He knows
that the good intentions of governments can quickly flounder when panic
sets in - such as the rash of headlines railing against double-digit council
tax rises. Will this happen again under a Tory administration? "Whether
or not once we're in government we would find an imperative reason why
all those good intentions were ditched, I don't quite know," he admits.
"I hope not. I see all the good intentions of this government have
now ended up in crude and universal capping."
But Curry, a Francophile and an admirer of the strong European municipality,
has much wider concerns. He sees councils hemmed in as never before, with
the Audit Commission (a creation of Margaret Thatcher) breathing down
their necks. "There's a gendarmerie in capital letters out here,"
he says. "God knows how many inspection regimes ... it's amazing
councils find time to do anything except being inspected."
He has viewed, with growing concern, the emergence of new governing structures
in councils under which the old committee system has been scrapped and
replaced by a ruling executive, or "cabinet", of 10 or so, with
the rest of the council relegated to the sidelines in a "scrutiny"
role. Curry says the system simply isn't working. "We would not have
prescribed how local government ran itself," he insists. "The
whole scrutiny thing has been an absolute disaster. Councils haven't the
slightest idea how to operate it. And half of all councils have the same
officers serving [both] scrutiny and executives, and half of them run
a whip on the scrutiny committees. We saw no reason why the system should
have been changed at all."
Worst of all, Curry says, social house building has plunged under this
government. (He has asked the Tory grandee, Sir George Young, to take
a long hard look at the issue). He doesn't quibble with the broad thrust
of Prescott's plans for hundreds of thousands of new homes in the south-east,
and says the party has commissioned special groups to examine the issue.
"I don't deny the demand is there," he says. "You don't
solve everything by persuading half the British population to live in
Liverpool, which seemed a fad a few years ago."
But he argues that the government has depended too much on exploiting
"planning gain" (under which developers agree to provide a proportion
of social homes in return for planning permission) to build a diminishing
number of homes for below-market renting. "If my record had been
as bad as this government's on the provision of social housing, they would
have excoriated me," he says. "There is a crisis in social housing,
a crisis of affordability."
This invites the obvious reply that the Thatcher-Major governments were
responsible for reducing the supply of social homes by forcing councils
to sell off well over a million council properties at generous discounts.
Such a suggestion clearly irritates him. "It really doesn't work
like that," he responds, with some exasperation. "If they [the
government)] believed that, they could have taken action to stop it, couldn't
they? They have tightened the rules, but only in certain areas. In any
case, many people who have bought have stayed in the same property. And
all that stuff about buying to rent to some kind of Bahamas-based landlord
... well, one university looked at that and found that, while there were
cases of abuse, it was limited. The problem is we have not been building
them. They've been focusing on affordability - and it's not delivering.
The Major government was building at a higher rate."
Curry is on a mission to expose what he sees as the government's hypocrisy
over its commitment to the newish concept of "localism", while,
at the same time, limiting the freedoms of town and county halls by rigorously
inspecting, monitoring and threatening to cap the budgets of authorities
considered to be stepping out of line.
He says: "The real problem is that we've constantly talked about
localism, devolution, but I don't think any government has really meant
it," Curry says. "Governments have always expected an equivalent
standard of service across the country for public institutions. If you
really believe in localism, then you ought to accept that you're going
to get differences. It may be I can vote to have a higher taxed council
delivering high-class services. You might prefer a low-taxed council,
and you're not going to get a good services. Unless you are willing to
say you'll get different services [across the country], then you're really
not devolving."
It is here that Curry parts company with "localist" zealots
determined to break up service provision - police, health, social care,
education, and much more - into separate neighbourhood silos. "If
you fragment functions into distinct, discrete activity - each with its
own little democratic capsule around it - then how do you make choices
about priorities and money?" Curry argues. "You've got your
police board, school board, highways board, getting money from the government
- so who decides whether you want to spend more on education? If you're
not careful, localism becomes the enemy of democracy, not its friend."
Philosophically, Curry is content with Michael Howard's commitment to
"sort out what we do with public services before we make any commitment
on tax cutting. We would have to be sure where we are going to find the
money. That is the policy and I've been trying to say that for years."
But Curry is keen also that the new Tory leadership embraces the two
halves of Britain - its varied urban centres as well as the countryside.
"We gave the impression we were confronting it, rather than getting
the best out of it," he says. "It is a multi-cultural, multi-ethnic
society. What is normal for my kids in London is unrecognisable in comparison
with my constituency. Perfectly valid. But we have been talking to one
[of the halves] and we need to start talking much, much more to the other."
The CV
Age 59
Status Married, three children.
Education Ripon Grammar School; Corpus Christi College, Oxford;
Harvard University.
Career Trainee reporter, the Journal, Newcastle; Brussels and
Paris correspondent, Financial Times.
Political background MEP, 1979-1989; MP, Skipton and Ripon, from
1987; junior agriculture minister and minister of state at the Department
of the Environment, 1993-97.
Hobbies Vegetable gardening - "I like very physical, hard
work."
Philosophy "1960s liberal - I've decided there's no point
in trying to fight against it."
New Labour? "Oh, they're far too rightwing for me."
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