Michael Heseltine’s entire career, from his early days in property, has been one of retreats and returns. And now aged 90, after five years in the wilderness, his star might be rising once more.
And his insight into the art of regeneration may be needed more than ever. Indeed, the last time EG spoke to Lord Heseltine he was experiencing something of a renaissance. It was 2015, and he had been warmly embraced by “the triumvirate”, as he puts it, of prime minister David Cameron, chancellor George Osborne and communities secretary Greg Clark.
“They were fundamentally in agreement,” says Heseltine, “and they were getting on with the job, with a sense that we have never seen anything to replicate it.”
He became one of Clark’s chief advisers, was made national infrastructure commissioner, gave his views on regional growth in the hugely influential report No Stone Unturned, chaired a programme to regenerate 100 housing estates, led the Tees Valley inward investment initiative and negotiated the Swansea city deal.
But in 2017, all that was swept away. After siding against Theresa May’s government over the “insanity of Brexit”, Heseltine was dismissed from all of his posts, as well as the Conservative Party, and banished to the political wilderness. There he stayed under Boris Johnson, watching from the sidelines as the levelling up dream was born.
Abandoning regeneration
There is a sense of bitterness when he talks of that period. He believes the improvements made during the Cameron years have been reversed or eroded. The move towards a single pot has gone, devolution may be moving forward, but the Treasury still refuses to hand over meaningful financial control. The attempt to coordinate the various departments, to set up a cabinet committee pulling together all the various ingredients needed for successful regeneration – housing, education, skills, finance, etc – has been abandoned.
“And it did exist. I mean, that is what is so awful,” says Heseltine with a touch of fury in his voice. “These things were there and they have gone. And it would take 24 hours, frankly, to recreate such a structure and it would send a signal that was valuable. And signals are important.”
He is dismissive of Johnson’s claim to level up Britain through a massive investment in regeneration projects.
“Boris’s life is one long ‘claim’,” he scoffs. “He was going to get Brexit done. He was going to set the country alive and all that, but it’s all platitudes. There was no substance.”
He adds: “You cannot have spoken, as I have, and think there’s any serious levelling-up agenda which is associated with Boris Johnson. His great legacy will be the disaster of Brexit.”
Since Johnson’s departure from No.10 and, indeed, during the leadership campaign to replace him, there are signs that Heseltine, or his reputation at least, is being brought back in from the cold.
Other than Margaret Thatcher, he was the politician most frequently name-checked by candidates in the leadership campaign. Liz Truss invoked him as the guiding principle behind her investment zones, while Rishi Sunak has long been a fanboy, quoting his speeches as a student.
Despite holding a variety of high-profile roles in government, from defence secretary to president of the Board of Trade, and being best known in business for his publishing empire, Haymarket, Heseltine has long had a passion for regeneration.
“It has been a privilege from my earliest political experiences to be involved in, not just the theory, but in the practice of regeneration,” he states.
Perhaps this is because his career started in property? After graduating from Oxford in the 1950s, the young Heseltine trained as an accountant. On the side he began buying and fixing up houses in Bayswater, W2. Before long, that enterprise – a favourite Heseltine word – was his main business and he was developing a small estate in Kent.
By the time Heseltine entered parliament in 1966, his developer, Bastion, had been wound down after becoming mired in debt.
Heseltine is somewhat dismissive of the episode. “I mean, we did property development – it was very exciting and I hope we did a very good job,” he says. But it wasn’t that which sparked a lifelong passion for regeneration. Nor was it London’s Docklands, where in 1979 he created the London Docklands Development Corporation, stripping Tower Hamlets, Newham and Southwark councils of their planning powers in a bid to transform the derelict areas into a new hive of activity.
“No, it was Liverpool. That really, really transformed my views on all of this,” he says. “In London you had 6,000 acres of dereliction and just a limited number of council buildings.
“You had dereliction on a huge scale… there was no obvious strength on which to build. There was a vicious circle of decline. Everything that could regenerate had gone, and any force that could regenerate was extinguished. So it was quite obvious what needed to be done. And it was a simple set of decisions that led to the development corporation.
“I’m quite pleased to have been part of it,” he says modestly. “But to get the thing in perspective, basically it was a new town commission in an urban area. So just as with a new town, bringing those strategic powers back to the declining urban areas was a logical step, which we did.”
But Docklands was an isolated case. True regeneration, he says, is far more complex. It requires something else.
Rebuilding Liverpool
It requires the approach that Heseltine adopted in Liverpool, where he was sent following the Toxteth riots of 1981.
In 1981, unemployment had reached 60% among the young Black population of Toxteth. A few weeks before the riots, a cabinet think tank had proposed that the area be left to go into “managed decline”. During the riots, police used tear gas and Thatcher contemplated sending in the Army. After she briefly visited the city, the PM decided to send Heseltine instead.
The idea of sending an establishment toff to a broken, Northern community almost seemed like trolling. Not everyone was happy with the decision.
“We all have our own backgrounds,” he says. “I mean, I come from a conventional middle-class background. I had a private education. And although I had lived in South Wales” – he was born in Swansea – “and knew something of what the other side of the world looked like, there is no substitute to actually being forced to face the pressures of it all.”
He adds: “At the time of the riots, I had already announced the Garden Festival which was going to play a significant part in the regeneration. And I remember a local person in ’81 shouting ‘Give us jobs, not trees’.” He utters a mirth-filled chuckle. “Years later the festival was so successful that they wouldn’t use it for redevelopment, which was the purpose of the whole thing in the start.”
For the next 18 months, Liverpool became Heseltine’s obsession. He went there every week, acting as a clerk of works, supervising each of the projects.
“Party politics played virtually no part in what I was doing in Liverpool,” says Heseltine. “Faced with a piece of derelict land, there is a limited range of things you can do. First of all, you have to own it. Secondly, you have to have a resource to deliver it. And thirdly, you have got to have partners – probably from the private sector, but not always – who are going to put something on it which will prove useful in job creation. And there was no party divide about this.”
He recalls a conversation with local Labour leader Dick Lloyd regarding Cantril Farm, a deprived area of Knowsley.
“He said: ‘We have tried everything, but it is actually rat infested, it has got violence, it has got social breakdown and it has got about 30% occupancy and people won’t stay there’. So I said to him: ‘I would like to look at that. But I would ask one thing of you, if I come up with a special solution that involves what you or some of your colleagues might feel is a doctrinal, Tory-type, private sector solution, you won’t oppose me.’ And I remember what he said, at once. He said: ‘We have tried everything. I can assure you, if you come up with a solution, we will not oppose it on party grounds’. And nor he did.”
Cantril Farm was sold to the private sector and became Stockbridge Village Trust. Last year, 91% of residents said they were satisfied with the community.
Liverpool was regenerated by Heseltine’s intervention, but perhaps it was him that was changed more by the city.
“When we came back from Liverpool in 1981, we were people transformed,” he recalls. “That experience, involvement in local communities and local decisions and the most acute of social and economic deprivation – it was transformational.”
He wrote his findings down in the seminal report It Took a Riot. The lessons he learnt from Liverpool would change his views forever.
“Not so much the things that I decided to do. It was the process by which I found those things. Talking to people, looking at strengths on the ground, searching out why derelict sites were derelict and what we could do and finding solutions. It was Liverpool in 1981 that persuaded me that real devolution, real leadership, real power and resource at a local level, real relevance to the circumstances was what we should be doing.”
He returned to the city later in his career, firstly when he was reappointed as environment secretary under John Major, and then in 2011 as a Cameron/Clark adviser to revisit It Took a Riot with former Tesco boss Sir Terry Leahy.
“The transformation was amazing,” he recalls. “When I first went there in ‘81 the question was, what are you going to do? And no one had any answers. Everybody knew what was wrong. It was always somebody else, never them. When we returned, they just queued up to tell us what they wanted to do. There was a terrific spirit. The transformation was absolute. You can’t escape the huge investment that the Grosvenor Estate made in the centre and a lot of European money went into Liverpool. But I think the fundamental thing is they found their guts, they found their spirit.”
“No easy solutions”
While Heseltine never worried that his approach in Liverpool wouldn’t work, he insists there are no sure bets in regeneration.
“You cannot predict what’s going to happen,” he says. “If I had made a speech in 1979 saying that Canary Wharf was going to come to London’s Docklands, Excel, the Dome, City Airport – they would have locked me up. They would have said: ‘This guy is off his trolley’. You can’t tell what’s going to happen. But you can create the conditions in which people, often people you cannot predict, will come and offer to participate. But what you have to have are the conditions and, above all, a person in charge.”
It seems this message is slowly filtering through to the current government. But Heseltine has issues with what he sees as its “top-down, whiz-kid approach” to regeneration. Easy solutions are still being sought, he says, instead of hard graft and long-term strategy.
The “weakness” with the interventions previously planned by levelling up secretary Michael Gove and those offered up by Truss and Johnson, is that “they lack total coherence,” says Heseltine. “You have to be able to talk about the totality of the area. If you are going to attract inward investment, you have to talk about skills and educational standards.”
He adds: “Someone in Whitehall has worked out “The Way”, not just to sort of produce some incentive but to produce an incentive that is acceptable to one side of the political argument that says it’s all about enterprise, it’s all about the private sector, set them free, they will sort out the problems. It’s just not real. And the moment you get involved and understand what’s made regeneration possible, you realise the poverty of that argument.”
This echoes recent criticisms of how the £2.1bn in the latest round of the £4.3bn levelling up fund has been allocated, which Tory West Midlands metro mayor Andy Street likened to a “begging bowl” and Labour likened to the Hunger Games, with areas fighting each other for handouts.
For Heseltine, any attempt at regeneration needs to come from the bottom-up. It needs strong local leadership and real devolution.
He references top-down decisions, such as the recent multi-million-pound fund to clear up chewing gum. “Who dreamt up that as a way of pursuing a levelling-up agenda?” he splutters. “It’s a trivial point but it’s symptomatic.”
But Heseltine acknowledges levelling up does appear to have changed of late. When Gove gave a speech in Manchester in late January, he said the “mission” would emulate what Heseltine had done in Docklands with the LDDC, invoking him alongside the “spirit” of Thatcher.
Heseltine approves of this new approach but despite the seeming shift towards his way of thinking with Gove’s reimagining of investment zones, he is hesitant to offer them his endorsement.
“There is nothing wrong with a freeport, or an investment zone,” he says. “But in order to make regeneration work you have to have control over the essential ingredients. And that starts with land assembly, planning, land acquisition and then access to the funds that can finance the changes you want.
“I fear that what is driving so many of these initiatives is the belief that the private sector on its own can cope with the problem. There is not a shred of evidence to believe that. Of all the regeneration schemes I know of, it was partnership that was essential,” he stresses. “It is the interrelationship, and I constantly come back to this point, between the public and private sectors.”
He adds: “Once you get into the cycle of expansion, improvement, environment enhancement, these things all flow. But they are not just private sector, they are public sector as well.”
Tory for life
And despite his firm belief in English devolution, he worries the nascent Mayoral Combined Authorities will lack the powers, funds and scope to push through lasting, quality change. In fact, if it wasn’t for Heseltine and the LDDC chief executive, Reg Ward, even the Docklands may not have proved to be the success it eventually became.
“We had this argument in 1979 with my old dear friend Geoffrey Howe,” recalls Heseltine. “He wanted to have an enterprise zone in the London Docklands, and that was a good idea. But it wouldn’t have worked on his own, because nobody would have been able to answer the fundamental questions about ‘who was going to be building alongside me’.”
Ward “refused to abandon the quality planning constraints that he thought were essential,” says Heseltine. “So he preserved the high quality of land assembly and planning and the environment that made investment attractive. And [Canary Wharf developer] Paul Reichman would simply not put his fantastic offices into an area unless he had those guarantees.”
Gove has echoed this point, too. Indeed, at his speech in Manchester, he appeared to quote the entire story, as though he had heard it from the same source.
Despite having the whip removed over Brexit and voting as an independent in the House of Lords for the past five years, Heseltine is still a Tory at heart. After his antipathy towards May, Johnson and Truss, it sometimes feels as though he is yearning for an excuse to return to the fold. “I’m traveling with hope,” he says.
Hope for Heseltine comes in great leadership. Local leadership from powerful, well-financed mayors. Central leadership from committed secretaries of state, acting in a coordinated manner with colleagues. And national leadership, from an interested and determined prime minister.
For Heseltine, regeneration is something far too important to be left at the whim of party politics. “It is unthinkable that some outdated dogma should stand in the way of a genuine partnership between people,” he says.
So after 90 years of life, nearly six decades in politics and more than 40 years thinking about regeneration, does Heseltine think he did all he could to enable that genuine partnership and was that enough?
“Did I do as much as I felt I could?” he ponders. “The answer is yes. Did I do enough? The answer is no.”
The question that lingers is: will he? Will the current and future governments, and will we?
To send feedback, e-mail piers.wehner@eg.co.uk or tweet @PiersWehner or @EGPropertyNews
