20170905 Things to note at WMCA Board

10 min readSep 8, 2017

Oh, WMCA Board, I have missed you so. It has been a wretched summer, and how better to leave it all behind than with hundreds of pages of papers that no-one reads? My point exactly.

As an aside, the meeting papers on the WMCA website are of equivalent accessibility to moon-letters. This needs to improve to ensure that the people who are actually trying to find them are not disheartened.

Update: The Mayor and WMCA Structures

This is likely to be a regular item for the foreseeable, given the number of new appointments being made by the WMCA. This Board, there are two to announce: Julia Goldsworthy is the new Director of Strategy (you might recall that she was already involved as one of the experts on the Funding for Growth work), and Sean Pearce the Director of Finance.

Julia is a smart appointment for the WMCA: a former MP and Special Adviser to the Treasury, with some significant experience in public service reform. Combined authorities would do well to make these sort of appointments: bright people who know their way around central government, thereby building an institution that can be ‘devo ready’ (I am trying to make this a thing, pass it on).

I have also heard on the WMCA gossip vine (being one of about five humans who would function as an audience for this sort of gossip) that we have hired a great (possibly interim) Director of Public Service Reform, having failed to appoint at the time it was advertised. I won’t ruin the sanctity of the official announcement by writing it here, but I may tell you in private if you a) care and b) ask nicely.

This section also touches on the appointment of the co-chairs of the Faith Conference Steering Group, being Professor Francis Davis (University of Birmingham) and Amrick Singh Ubhi (Nishkam Centre).

WMCA Digital Board

Fans of the Midlands Engine and West Midlands Science and Innovation Audit will know that digital technology and data is an ‘enabling competency’ as well as a sector in its own right:

If you don’t say innovation, is it really innovative, is my question to you.

It also features in the WMCA Strategic Economic Plan, as one of the eight ‘priority areas’, as you would expect. So, this item describes the WMCA’s efforts to appoint a Digital Board (focused on, not incorporeal), to draw together the region’s digital expertise and leadership, thereby enabling the development of a comprehensive, shared Digital Strategy.

It will encompass the following:

Development of a larger digitally-skilled workforce, in particular with education and training involving West Midlands businesses, ultimately establishing a Digital Skills Institute;
Improving the region’s digital infrastructure, to maximise connectivity, productivity and position the region for future technology developments; and
Using the above to attract business to the region.

It’s a principle that has been followed with Energy Capital — co-ordinating lots of interesting but atomised work and encouraging the participants to use the co-ordinating body to strategise and deliver together, thereby having more impact.

The ability of this body to work with the WMCA and its Members will be really interesting. The report references the lack of digital and smart city capacity within local government, so a key question for me will be whether this body addresses or otherwise compensates for that.

Mayoral WMCA Governance of West Midlands Fire Service

The Board are being asked to agree a Governance Review and Scheme to consider whether the proposed roles and functions of West Midlands Fire and Rescue Authority (WMFRA) for West Midlands Fire Service (WMFS), should be transferred to the Mayoral West Midland Combined Authority — to report back to the Board later this year. They are also asked to note a proposition for achieving this.

Bear in mind, in all this, that WMFS has lost half of its budget since 2010.

This created quite the bunfight last time it was discussed at WMCA Board — the Police & Crime Commissioner in particular was at pains to highlight that the alternative was to bring it into his domain. “Ministers have approached me!” he warned, waggling his finger. However, the working group set up to consider this felt that ending up in the Mayoral WMCA was an inevitable step on their collaborative path to reform, and are, so to speak, pushing on with skipping the middle man. They also highlight that working together has helped both to understand their shared aims around public service reform, etc.

So, under the proposals, all WMFRA property, rights, liabilities and staff will transfer into the WMCA, and the Mayor alone (power up) will have the power to exercise the functions of the body, delegate powers to officers, etc.

A new Mayoral Fire Advisory Committee will be established, with a membership that reflects the region. Lead Members for each place will be tasked with representing the Mayor’s priorities in the region.

Fine, I guess — but then we reach a bit which may be problematic: the committee is also tasked with reviewing the Mayor’s decisions. Does this mean Lead Members could, conceivably, have to champion priorities which they may have criticised? Or, perhaps worse, will they hold back from being critical as a consequence of that? The mix of Scrutiny and Executive support seems a little unsatisfactory to me.

I suspect some of this will come out in the meeting, but this is the proposed timetable for working it up:

WMCA Environment Portfolio Priorities

This portfolio was established when the Mayor came into post, and this is the first attempt to lay out some priorities and assign resources. You will all be delighted to know that this involves the creation of the WMCA’s 4,000th Board: the Environmental Delivery Board (#partypopper), which will support Patrick Harley as the portfolio holder. This Board will need to link to both a WMCA Director and one of the Council Chief Executives.

The priorities are in line with Sustainability West Midlands’ existing priorities, in the form of the West Midlands Roadmap to a Sustainable Future in 2020, which SWM reports on each year. Some of these priorities have made it into the Strategic Economic Plan, notably economic productivity, carbon reduction, and health inequalities. On these elements, the report states:

…we are performing well on economic outcomes, average on social indicators, and the poorest on environmental outcomes, such as carbon reduction and air quality. This is partly due to the scale of the challenge we face as one of the largest WMCA SEP areas, the location of the transport network, and our industrial base.

With the SEP and Mayor’s Renewal Plan taken together, the following priorities emerge:

Carbon reduction;
Air Quality;
Natural Environment;
Brownfield;
Green Business Growth;
Energy;
Waste.

In benchmarking the WMCA to criteria on sustainability leadership, strategy, and delivery, we are currently in second place — Greater Manchester is doing rather better.

Georgia Stokes, Chief Executive of the Wildlife Trust in Birmingham and the Black Country, was quick to raise concerns that there was no mention of “natural capital” among the priorities. It appears to sit under the Natural Environment priority, according to the appendices:

This isn’t to say that Georgia isn’t right to be concerned — this is not yet percolating into the WMCA’s existing activity, and that is a problem. In addition to the report’s acknowledgement that we are performing poorly on environmental outcomes in the round, the initial report from the Land Commission lacked an understanding of natural capital, nor was it referenced in the Mental Health Commission. This is problematic for a body that seeks to improve places via capital projects — natural assets are not incidental to this: clean air, green and blue spaces for citizens to enjoy, good soil to grow food in, etc. You only have to look to Houston to see how a place’s resilience to extreme weather events can be undermined by thoughtless development. Putting a value on that is the only way to ensure that we don’t make the same mistakes, particularly in a world where the funding of local government will become increasingly reliant on business rates.

Ultimately, if you don’t measure and don’t invest, it isn’t a priority. I hope these initial steps will take us there, but it will be a challenge to absorb these priorities into other activities if they are not firmly established early on.

WMCA Social Value Policy

The WMCA is adopting a policy which attempts to use the procurement and commissioning process to unlock social value in line with the following Social Value Themes:

Growth, skills and employment;
Promoting local businesses;
Creating healthier, stronger communities;
Protecting and improving our environment;
Social innovation;

Their analysis suggests that the policy could bring 16% of value beyond ‘business as usual’ — although this case is made using a weighted average, and (I fear) will still struggle to deliver value to the areas of the region that need it the most. However, this is recognised as a challenge:

In improving the wellbeing of citizens, we must recognise the differences and commonalities between the Authorities in the West Midlands. It will be the case that projects will benefit a variety of communities and we should ensure that over time such social value benefits are spread as widely across the region as possible. The governance for implementing the policy should include for monitoring and reporting back the commitments achieved so that these can be celebrated and the location of future requirements adjusted accordingly.

The policy will be used in the procurement/commissioning of goods and services over the value of £164,000, and over £4.1m for works, in line with EU guidelines. However, they have indicated that they wish to take a practical approach to using the policy for lower-value contracts as well.

It is planned that the policy will be launched at the National Social Value conference in November.

Black Country Land and Property Investment Fund — Funding Proposal for Administrative Functions

There is a lot in today’s paper’s relating to the nuts and bolts of the development and investment funds — but worth noting here that the administration of this one is to be funded via a topslice, and are to be underwritten by the gainshare revenue, in the event that things do not go to plan (i.e., they work up a capital project which is not approved). Precious revenue.

The Land Delivery Action Plan on the whole is a substantive part of this agenda — but as we have a Scrutiny task and finish group looking at this, I will do something separate on that.

Productivity & Skills Commission Update

I was interested in this section of the update, wherein the Productivity Leadership Group are seeking to understand why we are lagging behind the national average:

We have the largest gap in terms of WMCA compared to UK GVA per head in the Business Professional & Financial Services and Digital & Creative sectors and a gap that seems counter-intuitive for Advanced Manufacturing & Engineering. The Chair would like the Commission to develop a set of hypothesis to test why this is the case.
Suggested hypothesis are:
a) Capitalisation — Is a lack of capital investment in terms of quantum and/or effectiveness having a negative impact on productivity in our sectors?
b) Supply Chains — Is our supply chain composition impacting on productivity?
c) Productivity per Hour Worked — Why is labour productivity higher in the G7? Is it a methodological issue or can we learn from examples abroad?
d) Travel to work patterns — Is the lack of a high quality residential and schools offer impacting on our local economy?

I am Chairing a task and finish group on Skills and Productivity for Scrutiny — and my plan is to get approval from the committee next week to compare us to other city-regions, which should fit neatly with this work. So, as above, I will seek to do a separate piece to pull out some of the key points.

Employment Support Pilot

As the report states, “the WMCA employment support pilot will evaluate what the role of social support is in relation to employment and whether social capital can be developed to create and adapt social networks to support employment as the norm.”