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By MATT HONEYCOMBE-FOSTER
with Vincent Manancourt
PRESENTED BY
Happy Thursday and welcome to another London Influence. Can’t do a scandal if you never get invited to parties. Comments, tips and complaints to @matt_hfoster or [email protected] | View in your browser
SNEAK PEEK
— Stop worrying about mini-Andy Burnhams and give us more power, Northern leaders urge the PM.
— Fresh calls to tighten the revolving door after Britain’s privacy boss joins a law firm.
— Westminster’s newest think tank vows to challenge “fatalistic” thinking on an aging population.
LOBBYING WESTMINSTER
THE NORTH WILL RISE AGAIN: Boris Johnson may sound mad keen on closing the North-South divide these days, but the Northern Powerhouse Partnership has been banging that particular drum for ages. Now it’s warning that the PM’s flagship “leveling up” drive risks being just a “short-term political” project unless he gives away much more power to local leaders to actually make it happen.
NPP in a nutshell: The Partnership was set up by jobs-enthusiast George Osborne in 2016 after he left No.11, and bills itself as the leading voice for businesses and civic leaders who want to ramp up productivity and close the earnings gap in the North of England.
Give it away now: The NPP’s just published its “Life in a Northern Town” report, arguing it’ll take more than “superficial changes” to so-called “left-behind” towns like Workington to make leveling up stick. It stresses that proper transport connectivity for Northern city regions, investment in education and skills, and more power for metro mayors can offer meaningful improvements not just to big cities, but nearby towns too.
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Command and conquer: NPP director Henri Murison — a former public affairs chief for Yorkshire Bank who’s served as a senior Labour councilor in Newcastle — is pretty evangelical about letting local leaders take charge of leveling up, and no fan of a “command and control” mindset he sees coming from some parts of central government as it beavers away on that long-awaited (read: AWOL) white paper.
Basket case: “You can buy people as many hanging baskets as you want — but it’s not going to drive productivity,” Murison tells Influence. “And I think Whitehall is great at buying and paying for hanging baskets, but less good at doing anything to challenge the underlying drivers of productivity.”
We need to talk about Andy: Some Tories worry that empowering mayors in the North to get on with leveling up risks creating a bunch of Andy Burnhams — opposition politicians who end up acting as thorns in the side of central government.
But Murison takes that argument head-on. “The most dangerous thing in government is having these popular elected politicians and then not letting them have the levers to do stuff themselves,” he says. Better, he argues, to give mayors the power they’re agitating for and then have “a political argument after the event about whether they did a good job with the powers you gave them.”
Deeds, not words: “The rhetoric is great to me,” Murison says of the leveling up drive. “It’s exactly what we want. It’s a focus on regional equality. But is that about the longer term challenge? Or is it about shorter-term certain political considerations?”
Ain’t no party like a cross-party party: Murison reckons a cross-party approach to leveling up that is needed if it’s going to survive Boris Johnson. Osborne’s own Northern drive, he points out, saw the died-in-the-wool Tory work with “a load of Labour civic mayors,” and the result was a project that’s gotten sustained support beyond the life of a single administration. “You want to have that buy-in and support of your political opponents, so that … a future government is going to be made to keep doing the stuff that you started,” he argues.
Not a great start: The NPP was distinctly unimpressed with the £96bn Integrated Rail Plan unveiled a few weeks back, which saw two flagship high-speed rail schemes for the North significantly pared back. Gone is the Leeds-to-Birmingham leg of the High Speed 2 project, while Northern Powerhouse Rail — meant to improve links between Northern cities — was also substantially pruned. The Partnership manned the airwaves and rolled out the big guns to argue against the changes.
Anything to like? Murison was happy with a promised new line between Warrington and Marsden — but that’s about it. “You can’t say HS2’s for the Northeast when people in the Northeast can’t use it,” he says of the scaled-down proposals. “That’s just shamelessly wrong.”
Own goal? The NPP director sees Treasury penny-pinching, and even suspects the government “wanted to maybe re-announce some of these things before a forthcoming election.” But he warns it’s now handed a gift to Labour, who can claim credit for any u-turn that follows. “Suddenly, Keir Starmer and Rachel [Reeves] go from being people in the opposition who don’t matter, to having run an effective campaign to restore parts of the project,” he predicts.
Now read this: Murison’s among several top wonks who spoke to my esteemed POLITICO colleague Esther Webber for this must-read piece on why the leveling up white paper’s taking forever — and the big battle over how far it should really go.
QUICK HITS
ICO-NO: Eye-opener from my POLITICO tech colleague Vincent Manancourt, who has the lowdown on global law firm Baker McKenzie snapping up former U.K. Information Commissioner Elizabeth Denham.
Why the move matters: Baker McKenzie led Facebook’s legal defense against her old office’s enforcement action over the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and Vincent’s spoken to campaigners now urging a review of the rules on what regulators can do when they leave office. It’s an area not covered by the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments because Denham was neither a civil servant nor a minister.
ICO responds: The ICO said the former information commissioner is required by law to maintain the confidentiality of the information she received as part of her job, but that “there are no restrictions” on the work she can do. It added that it has strict policies governing the declaration of any interests, and that “no conflict of interest has been identified with regard to this role.”
Baker’s dozen: Baker McKenzie said both the firm and the former regulator “are very conscious of the need to respect her previous regulatory role and responsibilities as well as all confidentiality and professional obligations that arise from them.” They added: “All of this has been considered and planned for appropriately. Baker McKenzie has a firm commitment to good governance and the rule of law, which is one of the reasons why we are so excited to have Elizabeth join us and bring that regulator’s perspective to our team.”
SPEAKING OF ACOBA: The revolving-door regulator is still waiting for a reply from the government on its warning back in the summer that ex-No.10 aide Dominic Cummings “failed to seek the committee’s advice” on his paid-for Substack blog, ACOBA boss Eric Pickles told Labour’s Angela Rayner.
Transparency in action: Finding that out naturally involved clicking on a broken link in a PDF.
BACTA, THE FUTURE: Celebration time at SEC Newgate, which will now oversee public affairs, digital and PR support for lobby group the British Amusement Machine Trade Association. BACTA boss John White said the new tie-up will help “pivot BACTA’s political engagement toward a very exciting future for the industry post the gambling review.”
OLIG-ARCH ENEMIES: Top foreign policy think tank Chatham House warned in a fresh report that Westminster — and the Conservatives in particular — “may be open to influence from wealthy donors who originate from post-Soviet kleptocracies and who may retain fealty to these regimes.” The Tory Party raked in £3.5 million from naturalized British citizens of Russian and Eurasian backgrounds between 2010 and 2019 — and the volume of donations appears to have increased ever since, my colleague Cristina Gallardo writes.
Sleepy watchdogs: The authors warn that regulatory failures and a lack of enforcement — including on think tank and university transparency — make it pretty easy for shady figures to launder money and their reputations in the U.K. Chatham wants a new anti-kleptocracy strategy. More here.
CONTRACTS WATCH: The Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport awarded pollster Ipsos MORI a £120K contract to look at the “links between online safety and a healthy and resilient U.K. digital economy.” … Focus groups specialist Britain Thinks bagged a six-month, £2M contract to help the Cabinet Office research public opinion … What’s the intriguing “major ceremonial event” in London — involving the Cabinet Office; St Paul’s Cathedral; and the Metropolitan Police Service — that Transport for London put out a whopping £122M, five-year logistics tender for? Our DMs are open.
THINK TANK LAND
LIVE LONG AND PROSPER: Brits are living far longer than they did two centuries ago, yet the government’s still designing public policy around “19th century” life expectancies. That’s the message from a new think tank being set up to try and get Westminster — and the broader public — to talk openly about what increased longevity is going to mean.
New kid on the block: Phoenix Insights has been launched as offshoot of insurance giant Phoenix Group and it’s helmed by Catherine Foot, formerly of the Centre for Ageing Better, the King’s Fund and Cancer Research UK. The new outfit is being supported by agency Teneo, and boasts figures including ex-DWP Secretary Amber Rudd, former No.10 policy chief Camilla Cavendish, and NHS Confederation chairman Victor Adebowale on its advisory committee.
Age old questions: Right now, Foot tells Influence, Westminster and Whitehall are “not really fundamentally addressing the fact that we’re living in a society organized with 20th-century, maybe even 19th-century structures, that absolutely don’t support us to live longer lives well.” So the think tank will, she promises, ask big questions. What does a potentially 50-year career or a 30-year retirement mean for lifelong education, raising a family, or the social care system, for example? Expect the growing gap in life expectancy between the U.K.’s rich and poor, as well as the endless policy row over social care, to feature too.
Baby steps: Foot says there are already “pockets” of people in government thinking about what an aging population will really mean. The Department for Work and Pensions has, she points out, done plenty of work on helping older people retrain and stay in the workforce. Pensions auto-enrolment is another case in point. But Foot’s promising plenty more from Phoenix on labor market participation and skills in the coming months, as well as some serious thinking on what the U.K.’s housing crisis might mean for pensioner poverty over the long-term. “The state of the housing market for future generations looks pretty parlous, doesn’t it? And our whole state pension system is designed around the assumption that you will own your own property outright by the time you retire.”
Doing it on purpose: Of course, a big financial services company getting into the think tank space inevitably begs the question: what’s in it for them? Foot says Phoenix is genuinely “driven by their social purpose,” with its CEO Andy Briggs already serving as the government’s business champion for older workers and pushing for more support for women going through the menopause. She argues it also makes good business sense for the firm to be grappling with his policy questions, and hopes there’ll be a “genuinely symbiotic relationship between between me and the rest of the business” as it thinks about how to treat its own workforce and where to invest.
Beyond Westminster: Foot says she’s keen to ensure Phoenix benefits from “broad public engagement,” and it won’t, she says, focus “purely on Westminster and Whitehall.” To hone its thinking, the outfit will run a nationwide series of focus groups asking the public how they feel about longevity. “Are they excited at the prospect of these extra years? Are they fearful of them?”
Why the long face? “What’s important to me is challenging this incredibly negative and rather fatalistic framing there has always been around the impending fiscal apocalypse of our aging population,” Foot says. “There couldn’t be anything better, could there, than just a bit more existence? And yet, incredibly, we all seem to have turned this into a great disaster that we must manage rather than an opportunity to be seized.”
ON THE MOVE
Former SpAd Tim Pitt is adding another string to his bowl. The Flint Global partner will join think tank Onward as an economic policy fellow.
Matthew Lowe has been promoted to senior policy adviser at the CBI, leading on midlands policy and campaign work at the business lobby group.
Stefan Roberts is joining Hanbury Strategy as an associate director after a stretch in senior civil service jobs, including lately as head of strategy at the Office for Zero Emission Vehicles.
Karen Renshaw joined e-cigarettes firm Juul as head of U.K. public affairs after leading the Uber Eats public policy team at the ride-hailing giant.
Robert Gwynn, former public affairs manager at delivery firm Hermes, has been named policy and public affairs manager at electric trucks company Volta.
Tommy Gilchrist, a former parliamentary aide to Conservative MPs Andrea Leadsom and Elliot Colburn, has been appointed as an account director at David Roach Consulting.
Tyrone Urch, who helped lead the U.K. military’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, was cleared to set up an independent consultancy, ACOBA releases show.
UCAS promoted John Cope to executive director of strategy, policy and public affairs.
🎂: Inflect Partners just had its first birthday — and the agency is celebrating by looking for its first “tech-savvy, passionate” employee.
Jobs, jobs, jobs: TikTok‘s hiring a public policy manager … Teneo needs an associate political consultant … Paid EU traineeship going at Hanbury … The Department for Health‘s after a senior policy adviser …. The Centre for Social Justice is looking for a senior policy analyst.
Events horizon: The Resolution Foundation hosts Citizens Advice boss (and ex-Defra chief) Clare Moriarty to chat the cost of living squeeze, next Wednesday, 9.30 a.m. … Leveling up guru Neil O’Brien and top FT Whitehall hack Seb Payne talk rebalancing the economy at the Institute for Government, next Thursday, 12.45 p.m. … Bright Blue‘s bagged Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng for a one-day event on the “Roaring Twenties” and economic policy, Wednesday, January 26, 8.30 a.m.
Thanks: Imagine an even longer and nerdier London Influence. That’s the dystopia the mighty Kate Day and POLITICO’s production ninjas quietly save you from every week.
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