Lord Kerslake, chair of the Peabody Trust housing association, brings a unique perspective to England’s notoriously centralised system of government. Nobody else has been both head of the civil service and chief executive of a local authority. The then Sir Bob Kerslake gave up being in charge of Sheffield council in 2008 to lead the fledgling Homes and Communities Agency, and within three years he was doubling up as head of the home civil service and permanent secretary of the communities and local government department, before retiring in 2015.

The peer has harnessed this experience to chair a new House of Lords commission, the UK2070 Commission, set up to look into England’s city and regional inequalities, which has recently published its first report.

The highly centralised nature of England is part of the problem, Kerslake says: “We have the worst of all worlds. We have disempowered regions and we have a crowded centre, which is constantly thinking about the short term and the detail and not putting enough time into thinking about the big strategic issues that the country faces. We need to reverse that.”

We have the worst of all worlds. We have disempowered regions and we have a crowded centre, which is constantly thinking about the short term

Bob Kerslake

“I’m absolutely convinced that we would have a better, happier country if we were more balanced about how we make decisions.”

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