Assessing Party policy – the word from our local representatives

By Bev Haigh-Jones

We have spoken to another Cornwall councillor this time, but rather than a representative of one of the main parties, Tim Dwelly is an Independent who represents Penzance East. We were particularly keen to speak to Tim as he had been very vocal about the shortfall in replacement EU funding in Cornwall, an issue which Cornwall for Europe have always attempted to bring to public attention.

As with most previous meetings of this type, we had an opening statement from Tim, followed by a Q&A session where Tim is represented by the initials TD.

It was really interesting to hear Tim’s views on Brexit, on Cornwall, and on EU funding and you can see more at: https://www.facebook.com/TimDwellyPenzanceEast. Please also remember, there is a facility to comment on our articles if you wish, and any such comments will be passed on to Tim.

Tim Dwelly:

“Just quickly a little bit about me, I have now been a councillor for ten years and I represent Penzance East. I was leader of the Labour group until I was bullied out by some of the Corbyn supporters who joined the party that I have always supported to change it. I was also concerned about antisemitism at the time. So, I left the Labour Party and became an Independent. Things have changed with Labour since then, but I won’t go deeply into that now. In effect, I’ve always been a centre-left person and I also organised the campaign for Remain in Penzance during the referendum.

“Of course, none of us know what the figures were on a local level, but I can surmise that under-50s were probably remainers in Cornwall, and I should imagine that some towns were more so than others. It always irritates me when people talk about the whole of Cornwall voted to leave etc.

“People in the Independent group come from all political backgrounds, the former leader of the Lib Dems is an Independent, there are former Conservatives, so what I would say is that, although there are slightly different views, the Independent group at Cornwall Council currently is centrist and probably a majority would have been remainers, though there are some who weren’t. But I would advise you to assume that, though it may be true in other parts of the country, the idea that Independents are all closet Conservatives and Brexiteers isn’t the case here. A former colleague, John Pollard, Leader of the Council, who I very much respected and who very sadly died unexpectedly, was certainly very pro doing things with Europe.

“My cabinet experience is relevant to you. In the last council, before the Conservatives won, I was the Cabinet Member for Economy and Planning and that meant that I was very much at the forefront of looking at the Shared Prosperity Fund (SPF), and what was going to happen after the EU money came to an end. Also, before that I had been Chair of the Economy Committee. In fact, the Cabinet Member at the time that I was Chair of that committee was Julian German. He was the previous Leader of the Council that I am closely aligned to, and he and I are very strong Europeans.

“I think the things that you might want to hear from me most of all are some of the details about where we are in terms of the funding impact on Cornwall. Years ago, I was calling out those who told people that the replacement money would be £100m a year. Steve Double MP, in particular, publicly accused me of being a terrible scaremonger for predicting this. But he was of course completely wrong. I was only wrong in that it ended up worse than I predicted.

“In the recent news you may have picked up – after I obtained the figures – what actually happened to our funding in Cornwall. We used to get roughly £100m a year of EU special funding because of Cornwall’s status as a poor region, as seen by the EU. We were overtly promised by Boris Johnson, Rishi Sunak, the current Leader of the Council and Steve Double MP, that we were going to get the same money £100m a year.

“Then it came out that the settlement from the SPF was the equivalent over a few years, rather than a seven-year programme, of £43m a year. I asked for officers at the council to give me the figures. The SPF money that Cornwall received was £132m, plus £4.6m rural prosperity funding, but that was only over a few years. Rishi Sunak, the then Chancellor, in the budget statement he put out confirmed, and I quote, ‘total funding through the UK SPF will at a minimum match the size of EU funds in each nation and in Cornwall each year.’ The source for that is the 2021 budget. It wasn’t true, it didn’t match it. We got £43m during the period and, importantly, the SPF is almost now completely allocated and spent. There’s no more coming either. What that means in practice is that when councillors, or MPs, or others, or anyone, says I know your project, that’s a good one you should go and try for a share of the Prosperity Fund, is that the money is pretty much gone. As of October this year, the Cornwall SPF programme received 1,400 expressions of interest from businesses and organisations. There were 461 applications totalling a request for £375m in grants, that’s just the grants, the actual spend would have been way higher than that, they would have been putting up matched funding, but the money we had was £137m. You don’t have to be a maths genius or need a calculator to work out that the demand for this money was much higher, in fact three times higher than the money available. The money requested was not totally dissimilar to the amount we would have got had we had another round of European funding or the government had done what it promised outside the EU.

“For some of us, and I am sure that goes for many of you in this room, that comes as no great surprise and we warned of this, but Brexit happened and when any government promises something you hope that they will deliver it. The question I would put, and have put, is where were the MPs? Having six MPs from one party, or even if they’re not from one party, you would hope that Cornish MPs, regardless of the issue – it doesn’t have to be Europe or funding – would act together as a lobby, and even if they’re Brexiteers, make the case for the money for Cornwall to be something like the money that Sunak promised. Well, they didn’t, did they? Not as far as I’m aware, unless they thought it was all OK and didn’t read the figures properly. I think their hope was to get to the end of this period of the SPF and then another load of money would be announced. We were told at Cornwall Council a number of times in the Chamber – you won’t want to be watching all the debates – but Linda Taylor, the Leader of the Council, would say to me, and so would David Harris, Deputy Leader in charge of finance, that we were ‘being really naive, it starts as a small amount and builds up, don’t worry, it will be the same as the £100m over seven years by the time all this money has flowed’, but it just hasn’t happened.

“Governments of all stripes have funded national government programmes on top of the European funding we got, so we also had things like Regional Growth Fund, Single Regeneration Budget, Neighbourhood Renewal Fund. Both Labour and Conservative governments funded Cornwall with other funds, but Cornwall got the special EU extra money. I’m not saying other areas didn’t, but we certainly did, and I believe it was Prime Minister Tony Blair who disconnected Cornwall from ‘Devon and Cornwall’, which was how the civil servants saw it. I can remember I was even involved with going for some Objective 5B funds in 1999, which is an awfully long time ago, but once Cornwall was looked at as a place in its own right, the figures were shocking. They still are, of course, and the argument could be, ‘well it hasn’t really worked, why do you need this special funding?’ The answer is, if we don’t have that, think how bad it could be, and I look back and I remember making these points during the referendum. I look at where my kids went to college for example, Penwith College. I look at the fact that here I am talking to you now, with fibre to my house. Here we are using EU-funded fibre, all of us probably, and we have the best rural fibre network in Europe. We had some dualling of the A30, airport investment, harbour investment – well you know all these things – but then there’s the university as well. We did get a lot of things that we don’t need twice. We don’t need to create a university twice, or a fibre network, but there clearly is demand for things and you can see that in the figures I mentioned.

“There’s nothing sadder to me than to go back to what was said to me when I was on cabinet predicting that there wasn’t going to be enough money and being told that it was ridiculous scaremongering and political muck-raking, etc. Reading those comments, particularly from the rather rude Steve Double MP, is quite something now.

“At the last full council meeting I asked a question of Councillor Harris about funding, because you can see our capital investment programme going down each year, and that’s partly because we’re not matching with our money, stuff we would have had from the SPF, but the answers tend to be along the lines of shrugging shoulders, not got a crystal ball, who knows what might happen, but there is no answer to any more SPF. This isn’t just Cornwall, by the way, but it certainly affects us.

“So, we could talk about fishing, we could talk about all the things that I am sure you are aware of, care workers, you name it. Let me give you another example, with that lack of money going forward there will be a hundred jobs in economic development in Cornwall Council lost. They used to work for Cornwall Development Company for Cornwall Council and if we were eventually to get more money, that expertise would already have been lost. I think that there were only twelve jobs that were funded directly by the council. This was a fairly big team of people, some working on local projects via the Community Levelling Up Fund, local funds via the SPF and helping local councils to apply for funding for smaller projects. If that experience is lost, we may not get it back.

“What next? Clearly Labour will probably win the election, but they are definitely not going to commit to funds now that their opponents will say are unfunded, and there’s no sign of any commitment to anything like that kind of money. My understanding is that the devolution deals, (by the way, I was also heavily involved with stopping the mayor for Cornwall, but that’s a different story), if/when the next government is formed it’s expected they will have a high priority of quickly doing major deals with local government, which could be like a devolution deal without a mayor. So, one of the things I think a lot of us in Cornwall need to do, is to sketch out what we need and try to put that into a package of funding. The mayor offer that came through was only worth about £12m per year, nothing compared to the missing £57m from the £100m. So, the Independents will be lobbying really, really hard for a package for Cornwall that isn’t just helping us to keep going with economic development and social funds, but also rectifying the fact that compared to some areas of the country that are not as poor, we don’t get a good funding deal.

“We’ve got powers, by the way. The one thing that the government did do was to give us power over our own money, so the SPF now is controlled by Cornwall Council and there’s a Board which is entirely made up of Conservative cabinet members. We’re at least in charge of our own destiny as a place with this fund, and it’s likely that will continue whoever is in government. The question is, will there be anything in the pot, and you then get into the much wider question of fair funding for councils, and this council.

“I’ll just briefly mention a couple of other things that are Europe-related. In the last council, Julian German and I were pushing very hard for a strong connection with Brittany to see if we could do something to mitigate the damage done, particularly to the shellfish industry in Cornwall which went off a cliff with scallops and oysters, etc. Being outside the EU, we can’t easily export that type of shellfish without purifying them first and that not only costs money, but reduces shelf life. I didn’t really appreciate this until quite recently, but apparently all over France, when you eat all this wonderful crab and lobster, loads of it is from Cornwall. So, if you’re enjoying a spider crab in France it’s probably been caught down the road from where I live in Newlyn! I also talk to Harvey’s, the crab and lobster merchants in Newlyn, I go down and buy stuff there in the tanks, so I hear about the challenges from the horse’s mouth, or the crab’s mouth if you like. There have been particular sectors really hard hit, but a lot of this stuff will be happening to people all around the country, various aspects of agriculture, care home staff, etc. Because we are so far away from everything, it makes this worse. It takes five hours for a train from here to London, so there are some things like being remote that we just have to deal with. If you ever hear people saying, “Oh but there’s Levelling Up Funds,” well there always was government funding for everywhere in the country and Cornwall, as well as the EU funding, but the replacement EU funding is the thing that didn’t come through.

Right, I could talk for hours on this, but I’m going to stop there and then I am going to answer any questions, if I can.”

Chair: “Thank you very much, Tim, that’s been most enlightening, if not a tad horrifying as well. Any questions, anyone?”

Q: “Nice to meet you, Tim, and thank you for this…well, I’m not going to say the word, I am just horrified. It’s not really a question, but my view on EU funding, correct me if I’m wrong, but I’ve got this figure in my head, but I read somewhere that there were eleven places out of the EU that were deemed to be the poorest in Europe, nine of which were in the UK, and one of which was Cornwall. What I’ve always felt was not shared or understood at all, was that this funding was given by the EU because our own country were not looking after us, basically. For such a rich country it has always really shocked me and I don’t understand why people don’t realise that. So, the EU funding for Cornwall, and I know what you said about being called a scaremonger – we were there and we were told that so many times – and I’m not surprised about not replacing the EU funding, because actually they have never looked after us in the first place and where would that money come from anyway?”

TD: “All I would say philosophically, and in the long term, is that our country the UK is pretty divided in terms of wealth compared to others. I think the example one always gives is when Germany reunified, the amount of effort and money that went into bringing the East up to the West was massive and pretty successful. We have such huge contrasts between poor and rich areas in the UK, the figures are all there, you can Google them in a few seconds. With the EU I guess one of its missions has been to use the funds across the whole of the organisation with all the advantages you get, but then people put money in and are not necessarily net recipients. That was their job, they were looking for areas to try to bring up and we were one of them in Cornwall. People said in Cornwall we put more money in than we got back, but we didn’t, we were a net recipient.

“Going forward, I suspect sooner or later we will have to go into some sort of customs union, single market, or similar, or some version of it like Macron’s inner and outer Europe stuff. All these things are possible, and I don’t know if we’ll ever go back into the EU. My personal view is that with the world so shaky, with possibly Trump taking over in America, with what’s happening with Putin, it’s not a good time to go it alone and we are at least seeing a little bit of row-back on security and the Horizon programme. I should imagine that if we were having this chat in ten years, we would have done a Norway by then, but who knows, I may be completely wrong.

“In Cornwall, our Brussels office, which sounds very grand, but was basically some people who helped us make connections with other countries, was closed when the Conservatives came in. It didn’t cost very much money, but that closed down the ability for Cornwall to have links that worked, for example with exporting shellfish across to Brittany. Julian and I met the President of Brittany and it’s quite a big place, and he was up for it, but then that all went quiet. There are probably things that we can do in the meantime, and my prediction at the next election MPs-wise, is that there is a good chance of two Labour MPs and one Lib Dem. That’s not definite by any means, but I would say Jayne Kirkham is someone you should speak to, she’s the Leader of the Labour Party group of the council and is probably going to be MP for Truro & Falmouth, that’s assuming that people don’t all go off and vote Green in huge numbers, as that would hand it to the Tories. Then there’s Perran Moon in Camborne, Redruth and Hayle who is a strong candidate, and I don’t know if Andrew George will get back in St Ives, but if he doesn’t this time, he never will. So, I would say you might see a west/east split in terms of MPs, and although I don’t know what will happen, I think the Conservatives will struggle to hold onto control at Cornwall Council and, if so, it’ll probably be a bit of a coalition. If, in a year and a half’s time, there’s been a general election and council elections, you will be talking to different MPs and a different council. Those of us who are not Conservative on Cornwall Council work pretty closely together.

“I guess you’re most interested in whether we go back into the EU and I don’t think Cornwall Council will be calling for that, and I wouldn’t be part of that because it just gets people’s backs up. Better to push on trading relations and go for the softer stuff. Also, Cornwall can’t decide on the customs union and the single market, but Cornwall could be openly collaborative with our neighbours, particularly the Celtic countries. I do feel that arc across with Brittany and parts of Spain and Ireland, of course – and Wales – is a very strong potential collaboration.”

Chair: “Just to let you know, we have had Perran in the hot seat and we have Jayne lined up, possibly for our next meeting in January.”

TD: “Well, you have sort of covered the Independents with me, but in terms of the thoughtful Conservatives who might be worth you talking to, perhaps try Connor Donnithorne. He’s Conservative candidate for Camborne, Redruth & Hayle and I suspect a remainer. Ollie Monk is another one, he’s currently cabinet member for planning and I suspect was a remainer. As for the MPs, George Eustice might be fun. Although he comes from a Brexity background, he’s actually much more open to talking now that he is out of government. There’s Mebyon Kernow and the Greens, (Chair: We have had Dick Cole of MK and we have our very own Green in Tom Scott), well with the Greens there is one Green councillor, Tamsyn Widdon, who has some interesting things to say.

“Sorry, any more questions?”

Q: “Yes, just something that came to me when you were chatting, Tim, about the funding. We were with you in fighting against a mayor for Cornwall, including campaigning on the streets since we were all against it, but I seem to remember hearing a day or two ago that, having stopped the Devolution 3 deal, Devolution 2 is now on the table. Are there any details of that as yet?”

TD: “It’s gone through and it’s pretty minor. The so-called Big Deal for Cornwall wasn’t, it was £12m per year, and very flaky stuff, so, as I said in the context of the £100m down to £43m, a number of us have been pushing hard for a campaign for the next government to do something more significant without a mayor, and the position of the Lib Dems, as well as Labour, is that there is no need for a mayor to do a deal, so I think that’s where we should put our efforts. In fact, finally, the group leaders at County Hall have agreed to talk to each other about this, but as far as I know at the moment, there is no major work being done, which is a bit silly really because the officers of the council should be preparing for it since there is at least a chance – some might say a racing certainty – of a change in government, which could be even as early as next May, but certainly by next autumn. We need to be ready for that. But the Conservatives don’t want to be saying that they’re working on that. I think all the detail of the deal is available somewhere online, but I don’t think it’s any great shakes. I gather there was £500k for Cornish distinctiveness, or something as a bit of a sop, but nothing of real value.”

Q: “How big is the Independent group on Cornwall Council?”

TD: “There are 15 of us. We are the official opposition. We have one or two more than the Lib Dems, so we are the second biggest group in council, but we lost a lot of well-known names at the last election. I think what’s really relevant is how big is the block that’s non-Conservative. Generally, Lib Dem/Indy is the alternative, but I’m certainly open to the idea of seeing whether other parties might be part of that, and I think the mood is quite keen on that. But the Leader of the Council, whoever that is, has to choose the best people for the jobs.”

Q: “When are the next Council elections?”

TD: “They’re in May 2025. I’ve been doing this a while now, and usually just before the Christmas before a May election things hot up, so we are only a year away from being in council election mode.”

Q: “Tim, you said you don’t think it’s a good time to be talking about rejoining – do you think attitudes of leave voters have changed at all, e.g. from talking with fishermen, farmers and others?”

TD: “Well, I guess so. I’m not saying that I am going around chatting in pubs and down at the fish market with everyone and saying, ‘Hey, I’m all for Remain me and have you changed your mind yet, you silly sausages?’ That’s not what I do, but I think the polling nationally is pretty clear on that. I think perhaps one needs to go back to basics – can we get the staff in care homes, for example. We seem to have ended up with a growing amount of immigration, but not from the EU, and they are often people who have to bring their families with them, and I’m not saying they shouldn’t come, but the costs to the state are probably higher than for relatively young, Eastern Europeans coming here, staying for some years and then going back again. Where I live, I’m right near where the daffodil picking goes on above Mount’s Bay, and you do still see buses of Romanians and Bulgarians, with permission, coming in and doing that awful job in January, so there are still some people allowed in just for short periods. With the fishing industry, some of them running the markets and things were actually anti-Brexit. It’s a bit of a myth that they were all pro-Brexit, some of the guys on the boats may have thought that way, but there were people in that industry against. But it’s not like everyone is clamouring for a Remain campaign. You might be, but I don’t pick that up. I think most people probably think that it’s a mistake, but don’t want to change it because they can’t face the hell of all that division again, that’s probably my take on it.”

Chair: “We actually came and did a street stall in Penzance about a month to six weeks ago, and Penzance was traditionally one of the hard places to come to because you would really get a pasting from people, but actually an awful lot of people were very anti-Brexit. A lot of it is tied up as well with being anti-government of course, which is understandable, but a lot of people were very thoughtful about it and were really pleased to see people out campaigning.”

TD: “I think it would be useful to know what you could all ask of Cornwall Council or the MPs, beyond the big stuff. Are there specific tasks that you could put and say, ‘Look we want to see Cornwall do x, y and z’, and I’d have a look at dusting off the export of shellfish issue, for example. There might be specific things that could be campaigned on, but the powers to make major changes in the council are reasonably limited. That said, it’s quite a big council, it’s one of the biggest in the country and it’s got lots of land and lots of funds. Having said that, it’s got too much to do with them and it’s struggling badly, but I do think the labour market issue is the one to focus on. I personally think that care homes is the one, as anecdotally there are fewer Eastern Europeans around in my area in Cornwall than there used to be, but their countries have done better.”

Q: “I was very impressed with all the media coverage you got recently about the budget and the lack of funding, and the broken promises. We are an organisation with nearly 30,000 following our page and we are active, we run regular street stalls, so I think what I want to say on behalf of Cornwall for Europe is that we are with you, so when you need a bit of going out there and saying things, think of us. I really, really enjoyed seeing that because as you say, people don’t want to go back there, but actually as we see it unfolding, these are the conversations we want to have and think are really important, especially in this period, to regain that trust in what the EU does, what we used to have and have lost, these are really crucial conversations to have, I think.”

TD: “Thank you, and I agree with you. You know, I’m here, stay in touch, see what happens with the next council whilst you’re still doing your campaign, and I think practical, deliverable suggestions that can be done by Cornwall Council, or MPs in Cornwall can pick up highlighting those issues – I mean you may have others, but I have mentioned a few – that’s something that with the right leadership we can at least start to address. We, me and my Independent colleagues, would be lobbying government, with MPs I hope, to try to clear up some of those issues, like the shellfish exports. When we were in power, we tried to lobby the current government, and funnily enough George Eustice was the minister we were lobbying. He was sort of sympathetic but shrugging his shoulders really but let’s see – small steps.”

Q: “He dropped the ball on shellfish very badly, didn’t he? So perhaps that wasn’t an area that he wanted to revisit.”

TD: “Well, either he dropped it badly, or he knew he wasn’t going to get anywhere with it, and he wasn’t exactly strongly lobbied, though at the time we were running the council, so you might get further being listened to if you are of a similar outlook. I think the sad thing is, though, that the next government is not going to have the money to do what we would like it to, and I know Keir Starmer and co. won’t be saying any of these things, but I’m pretty sure that some form of closer relationship is coming. In the meantime, you’re a Cornish organisation and I think we need to work out what we can do. I know Julian would say this if he was here, strong connections with our Celtic colleagues in places like Brittany, economically is a good way to go, I would say.”

Chair: “Well, thank you, Tim, very much! We have been informed and stimulated by your contribution.”

TB: “Not at all, I enjoyed it and I wish you the best of luck and keep in touch, I’m still here for you.”

We are hoping that next time we may have another of these articles for you, hopefully from a representative of a different political party. If you have any suggestions for people you would like us to invite, please let us know here.