The integrated approach to the funds’ application required a level of governance that Merseyside had rebuilt in only a limited way since the abolition of the metropolitan county council by way of the MIDO steering group. For the Objective One funds, the institutional arrangements for the
management of the programme comprised a Managing Authority, a Programme Monitoring Committee (PMC), and a Programme Secretariat, to which were in Merseyside added two technical panels, a number of ad hoc advisory groups, and community partnerships. The principle of
partnership meant that regional representatives of the private sector and civil society had to be involved, a stipulation that has been applied in a highly uneven manner across Structural Funds recipient regions since the 1988 reforms (Bailey and de Propris, 2002). The Managing Authority was the UK government, which retained ultimate responsibility for the programme through the GOM, which was to become the GONW in 1998, while the programme secretariat was also based in the GOM. It was the PMC’s role to provide the programme’s strategic direction and to monitor its implementation. The Merseyside local authorities, the GOM, as chair, and the Commission were all present in the PMC, alongside representatives from other public bodies, the private sector, and the voluntary sector.
The Objective One PMC provided a continuation of strategic governance at the Merseyside level that had begun, in the post-metropolitan county era, with the MIDO steering group. Due to the greater weight of responsibility and, crucially, funds granted under Objective One, however, the PMC was more effective in its ability to draw together actors from across the sub-region.
‘I think it was relatively new in terms of the way it impacted upon the range of organisations in a place like Merseyside. I think people had been living in their own little patches, largely, once the county had been abolished. There was a lot of ambivalence towards the county. While it was there it wasn’t treated very well by the sum of other organisations underneath it but when it was gone people understood what had been lost. My abiding memory of that time was that before we got Objective One I spent hardly any of my time working with the other local authorities and with any other actors on the Merseyside scene. [Not] in any real sense. After Objective One I spent nearly all of my time working with those bodies.’ (Interview with former Liverpool City Council senior officer.)
While the local authorities were effectively brought together though, engagement of economic and social partners, from SMEs, the third sector, and trade unions, was limited. While SMEs were eventually engaged with more strongly after a lobbying effort on their part through the formation of
the Merseyside Business and Manufacturing Challenge, there remained only limited engagement with the third sector and the continued exclusion of trade union representation until the election of a Labour government in 1997. This was a result of the strategy of the national government of the era to exclude trade unions from the process of governance, one at odds with the prevailing view across Europe and that of the Commission, and contrasts sharply with those nations in which the notion of social partnership was already strongly applied, such that employers’ and employees’ representative groups were given equal weighting (Mays, 1995).
‘[The UK government] didn’t want the regional TUC on the monitoring committee; they had to wait until Labour got in nationally. Civil servants kept them informally engaged, but they didn’t make it formal because they knew it was a no-no. But for Brussels, it was standard – “what’s going on? If you want the programme you’ve got to have a workers’ representative”. So there was all that going on over the first programming document.’ (Interview with senior academic active in policy-making discussions.)
Additionally, a failure to make clear the rules by which funding could be obtained encouraged a number of private sector businesses to become frustrated over a lack of ability to bid for funds due to EU competition rules (Ecotec, 2003). Over the course of the programme, business was engaged with much more strongly, with greater inclusion of private sector actors on the PMC, the Monitoring Committee and the Technical Panels, and the involvement of local firms in initiatives such as the Partnership for Learning project, in which a group of large firms provided high level skills training to SMEs on a commercial basis.
Issues around the balance of power in partnerships are prominent, with the distribution of power seen as resulting more from unseen negotiation than from formal agreements. In this
understanding, the exclusion of social partners is complemented by the usurping of power by an arm of central government (McQuaid, 2000). The GORs have been criticised for exercising an excessive degree of central government control over the application of the Structural Funds across the UK during the 1994-99 period, through their management of the programme secretariats, which has been seen to limit the extent to which regional ownership of the programmes has resulted (Lloyd and Meegan, 1996). According to Jones and Keating (1995), the interaction of local government and the regional arms of central government departments, embodied as the GORs, with the Commission had, by the mid-1990s, increased the sense of regional and European identity in the UK, though, strengthening relations with the EU and leading to impatience with the centralist attitude of central government. This is confirmed by an interview from a Liverpool City Council Senior officer
‘The government kept a pretty iron fist on the way money was dribbled out to things. They were really running the programme and they were constantly making sure that their imprint was on the programme and they were certainly cracking the whip against the QUANGOs that they had established, whether it was the TECs or the UDCs. The government were making sure that their agenda was being promoted as well.’ (Interview with former Liverpool City Council senior officer.)
Not all interviewees took a negative view of the extent of engagement with economic and social partners, with one making the case that the role extended to local partners in the Merseyside PMC was greater than that required under the Structural Funds regulations, leading to a method of working that depended on functioning relationships between partners and between the Managing Authority, the PMC and the programme secretariat:
‘Yes, the Managing Authority is the one that takes the decision to put the project forward to a committee, if that’s what they want to do but actually the Managing Authority could run the programme by calling for projects, appraising them, running an eligibility check, and approving them. However, sitting around the programme is a Programme Monitoring Committee, with partners sitting on it, and if you’re a Managing Authority and you have projects that actually go against what local partners want to do, you’re dead. You can’t do that, so you’ve got to work in a slightly different way but, technically, in terms of the regulations, the Programme Monitoring Committee does not approve projects. Now, we have here, in the North West region, always had a way of looking at it and a way of involving partners in actual project approvals, but technically it doesn’t have to be run that way. So relationships matter, and they matter enormously, and whoever runs the programme secretariat has to spend his or her time with partners.’ (Interview with former Liverpool City Council and NWDA senior officer.) As well as lacking a governance structure, Merseyside had also lacked a strategic plan since the Merseyside Structure Plan had ceased to be effective. The SPD that set out the needs of the sub- region and the measures deemed suitable to address these took on the role that had been played by the structure plan, allowing the medium term future of Merseyside to be considered by a body responsible for the whole of the sub-region and thus able to address more strategic concerns than would otherwise have been the case.
‘Then we got the SPD, which provided a kind of strategic plan for Merseyside, in the absence of anything else. And they did things like they bought into the idea of Strategic Investment Areas that spanned local authorities, which you wouldn’t have got if you’d just had five
different local authorities doing their thing.’ (Interview with senior academic active in policy- making discussions.)
This newfound function of strategic planning, together with the amount of funds allocated, was thought by some interviewees to have exacerbated the extent of Merseyside’s peripherality in the North West. It can also be said to have potentially added to the difficulty of working towards an agreed vision for the wider region, as noted in the previous chapter on the range of strategic documents produced at that time (Carley, 2000). Governance activity at the North West scale had been stepped up following the visit of Graham Meadows, of the Commission, there in the early 1990s, and the encouragement then given for a form of North West strategic planning. Even after this, though, Merseyside was viewed as having played a minor role in the governance of the wider region, which was to become even more so once Objective One funds were allocated.
‘I don’t think Merseyside was a big hitter in the North West and when we got Objective One it became even less of a big hitter because it detached itself [from the rest of the region]. I think there was almost a reaction of “we’ve got ours now, what we have we hold” and that was partly a reaction to the fact that before that Greater Manchester had been so dominant.’ (Interview with former Liverpool City Council senior officer.)
Problems of parochialism were also present in the fractured governance arrangements of the sub- region, in spite of the impetus given by the programme management and the SPD for joint working. These were seen to limit the scope for the development of a coherent strategy for the programme, as the focus of different partners on their own particular bounded areas and remits negatively affected strategic working (Evans, 2002). Over the course of the Structural Funds programmes, though, interviewees were of the opinion that collective working improved, leading to a more coherent strategic focus and greater agreement on priorities for investment than had been the case at the beginning of the 1994-99 programme.