The UK of the Regions

By Christopher Booker

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The shambles over those 100,000 spoiled ballot papers in Scotland illustrates yet again one particularly odd aspect of the Blair legacy: the degradation of our country's local government since it was taken over by John Prescott in 1997. Prescott's grand plan was to divide the United Kingdom under 12 regional governments "designed" (as he boasted in Brussels, if not in Britain) to bring us into line with the "Europe of the Regions".

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In 1998 he accordingly put through six Acts of Parliament. Three of these gave "devolved" governments to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, and a fourth to London. A fifth set up the eight regional development agencies and assemblies that he intended to be the embryo of regional government for the rest of England. The last, giving a clue to the rest, divided the UK into those 12 vast regional constituencies used for elections to the European Parliament.

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All went well for Prescott's grand design until in 2004 the voters of the North East chucked out his planned elected regional assembly. But this has left the festering scandal of a whole tier of regional government across England, given ever more powers and spending £2.3 billion of public money a year, all without any democratic accountability.As for what these costly bureaucratic abortions get up to with our money, few people know nor care. But hats off to the Brighton Argus, which recently focused on the accounts of just one.

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The South East England Development Agency (Seeda), with a staff of 300 costing £20 million a year, presides over the affairs of a vast, amorphous tract of England, from Banbury to Dover, and Milton Keynes to Portsmouth.

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Commenting on his newspaper's devastating exposé, its columnist Adam Trimingham asked how any public bodies could justify splashing out £115,000 on an awards ceremony in Brighton "promoting green business"? Or £1,600 on a lunch at Osborne House in the Isle of Wight, attended by just 10 guests and four Seeda officials?Could it really be right for Seeda's part-time chairman James Brathwaite to receive £76,000 a year for three days a week, not to mention charging £93,000 for secretarial expenses since 2002 rather than using in-house resources?

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In noting that a company of which Mr Brathwaite is listed as a director received Seeda funding, Trimingham emphasised that "there is no evidence of wrongdoing", but asked if this might not raise a possible "conflict of business interests".He also noted how much time seemed to have been spent by Mr Brathwaite and Seeda's chief executive, Pam Alexander (herself on £157,000 a year) "jetting round the world, staying at luxury hotels" on Seeda business. Their £55,000 annual taxi bill, of which Mr Brathwaite's share averaged £230 a day, was described by Norman Baker, a local MP, as "grotesque".

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What is all this lavish spending in aid of? Something of its flavour emerges from a recent bulletin of the taxpayer-funded South East Regional Assembly. This reported how Seeda had launched a study to "propose ways of measuring progress against actions in the region's Social Enterprise Enabling Framework.

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Capacity building within Business Links is underway and Seeda is piloting a social audit tool that will help measure businesses' social and environmental impact" (one hopes there will be an audit of the "carbon footprint" created by all that jetting round the world by Seeda's officials).Having in recent years read more such extruded verbal material from our regional development agencies than I care to remember, I can say that not one such document is ever written in anything but this kind of mind-numbing gobbledygook.They appear to be there to provide armies of officials with an excuse to spend huge sums on bureaucratic timewasting, and boring the rest of us to death.

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The shadow chancellor George Osborne has said, if the Tories win power they will carefully consider whether this part of the Blair-Prescott legacy should be abolished. They should not hesitate for a moment. Go for it.