15 minutes with… Jim McMahon MP, shadow minister for local government and devolution

On being leader of Oldham Council:

My starting point was the place and the people who lived there. That’s why I came into politics. A lot of people said that the council does things to us rather than with us and against our interests. I wanted to create a partnership and to achieve the type of town we wanted we had to maximise every single resource we had and the biggest resource was people. How do you bring people together, get them behind a shared vision and to realise they have a role to play? To do that the council had to change. It was such a significant, often dominant, feature of that relationship and had lost direction. It needed to take responsibility for the role it had to play.

On regenerating Oldham:

My view is that it’s for the people to decide what they want for their town and to work together towards that ambition and not wait for someone from outside to tell us what to do. One of the advantages of a Conservative government in Westminster is that it doesn’t really care what happens in Oldham and there’s a certain license to operate. It was an opportunity to highlight to people that the money will run out and that we’ve been through decades of people telling us what to do and the town is no different. The council had to take on things that weren’t its responsibilities but council staff are people that work and often live locally and desperately wanted Oldham to be a better place. I used that as a vehicle to get people energised and focused.

But then you need a plan. If you just stand up and have warm words it will have no impact. The plan for Oldham was dealing with its symbols of neglect: the local football club had an uncertain future; we were the largest town in UK without a cinema; Rochdale had a Marks & Spencer but we didn’t. To local people these are important symbols of how well our town was doing. We sorted out the stadium at Oldham Athletic. The old town hall that had been empty for 20 years has now opened as a new cinema and restaurant complex. We spent £1m on an independent quarter so that local people could have a stake in the town centre regeneration. A new tech hub is being created with O2. Marks & Spencer has signed to be in a new retail centre. The Duke of York came to open the new cinema this week and said that Oldham has seen some dark days but now it can see the horizon. I think that’s fair: we are not there yet but we can see where we are trying to get to.

On austerity:

Councils have reformed as much as they can. The cuts to local government have been far in excess of cuts to central government departments. Councils have worked across different public sector organisations and been creative in maximising income. But there is an inherent demand for public services and there needs to be fair funding in place to support them. I worry that too much expectation is being put on the council tax bill. Deprived communities are being asked to pay more and more for what are historic issues in their town. It’s Whitehall that needs to change. It needs to devolve much more down to local authorities that have proved they can run services efficiently and are far more accountable to the local population than Whitehall will ever be.

On devolution:

The assumption should be devolution. At the moment local councils are expected to come cap-in-hand and prove they are able to take on extra public services. The opposite should be the case. We need to change the relationship so that the assumption is localism. We need to make devolution a grassroots movement that empowers the community.

I agreed the Greater Manchester devolution deal but it doesn’t have the levers of power needed to deliver what people are asking for – more affordable housing and good education. It’s a very constrained deal without genuine fiscal devolution. I see devolution not as handing over powers and responsibilities but as a new settlement between local and central government. There should be a contract in place about what the community needs and how local government will respond. That’s where the deal should sit, not between local and central government. I see the Cooperative Council network route as part of making devolution a community response. They are trying to redefine the relationship between the community and the local council.

On local public services:

The process we are going through at the moment with devolution is about progressing the debate, proving concepts and proving that concerns we have about a postcode lottery are ill-founded. For public services to really work and be responsive to local need they ought to be different in different areas because our local communities are diverse. There should be a framework and quality standard in place but local variation and priorities should be welcomed.

On the UK’s local economies:

The UK needs to sort out its own house first. No town or city is an island but is part of an interrelationship with the broader UK economy. Towns like Oldham have a strong manufacturing and engineering history and I think it’s right to ask if our place in the world is where it needs to be. For any country to be resilient we need strong engineering and manufacturing bases, our own energy suppliers, public utilities and good infrastructure. We’ve been in a race to the bottom and have embraced globalisation in a way that’s allowed us to go for the cheapest solution. BAE Systems used to employ 20,000 people in Oldham. Those jobs have been replaced with distribution and warehouse jobs. The government needs to get its place in the world sorted out so that there are firm foundations from which places like Oldham to build unique specialisms in their localities. When Labour was in power it replaced the private sector jobs with public sector ones but we should have had a parallel process building a decent local economy too.

On Oldham voting for Brexit:

I knew from conversations in Oldham that people felt powerless to stop the decline of decent jobs and homes and felt their children had worse prospects than them. We should honour the decision of the public and use it to give people more control over their lives and I see devolution within England as a crucial part of that. I don’t trust the Tories to negotiate in Oldham’s interest so the role played by UK parliament is important, to give proper scrutiny to the deals that are agreed.

As a country we sometimes allow ourselves more confidence than we are due while at times we lack the confidence we ought to have. We are confused about our place in the world at the moment and things are changing rapidly. We should be proud of our past and our nation.