The biggest shake-up in local government for 50 years – that is how Labour’s white paper, Power and partnership: Foundations for growth, has been described. It proposes a constitutional settlement extending devolution to the whole of England.
The case for devolution is the stimulus it offers to local patriotism and pride in the development of public services. In a decentralised system, each authority will strive to ensure that its performance is better than that of its competitors. The emphasis will be on achievement, and mayors will compete in proclaiming how well they are doing.
By contrast, if a centralised or nationalised service emphasises how well it is doing, government will shift resources elsewhere. Such organisations, therefore, can never appear to be too successful. Instead, they must always be pointing out their deficiencies. That is hardly likely to strengthen the morale or effectiveness of those working within them.
Devolution in England began with the Cities and Local Government Devolution Act of 2016, the brainchild of the Conservative chancellor George Osborne. It was to be achieved by combined authorities led by a directly elected mayor. There are now 12 such mayors, and about 61% of people in England live under mayoral regimes.
Such regimes provide strong and visible local leadership, with a mandate to represent their locality even in areas for which they do not enjoy statutory responsibility. They also yield a focus on accountability that is lacking in the traditional committee system, hitherto dominant in local government. Though I perhaps follow local matters more closely than most, I would be hard-pressed to name the leader of my London borough council. But 83% of people in Greater Manchester recognise Andy Burnham.
So far, however, devolution has been ad hoc, creating a patchwork across England without any discernible geographical basis. More than 90% of the north is covered by devolution, but only 46% of the south.
The white paper proposes devolution as the default position for local government. While a mayoral regime is not a requirement, those local authorities that choose this option will receive more powers from the centre than those that do not.
Devolution, however, is hardly compatible with our fragmented system of local government. In Nottinghamshire, for example, there are a range of local authorities – including a county council responsible for infrastructure and transport, several district councils responsible for housing and commercial development, and in Nottingham itself, a unitary authority where the county council has no remit. Few voters can be aware of which authority is responsible for which service.
So the government proposes a unitary system of local government based on the counties. But that means remote local authorities with a population of 500,000 or more. Will Bideford feel represented by Exeter, more than 40 miles away, or Ramsgate by Maidstone – about 45 miles away?
To combat such remoteness, devolution must be complemented, as Florence Eshalomi, the chair of the Commons housing, communities and local government committee, has suggested, by devolution at local level. On the continent the standard pattern of local government is a regional layer combined with a small local layer, comprising a far smaller population than is represented even by our district councils. In England, the smallest local layer comprises the 10,000 parish and town councils. They should be strengthened and established in areas that don’t have them so that local people do not feel disfranchised.
Nor is it any use devolving powers from central government without also devolving revenue-raising powers. After all, potential investors in a locality will ask not only does it have power, but also, can it offer tax incentives.
Combined authorities are partly funded through their constituent councils by a levy, but they cannot raise additional resources. Metro mayors derive most of their funding from government grants. They lack power to establish their own taxes or set taxes locally. They are supplicants to Whitehall for funds.
Nor is it easy to reconcile the white paper with the government’s housing proposals, which envisage central government pushing through development plans even against the wishes of localities to ensure that its ambitious building programme is achieved. In housing, the role of local authorities will be to deliver government policy, rather than to use their knowledge of local needs to decide on priorities for their own areas.
This raises a fundamental constitutional problem. Which powers should be devolved and which should be retained at the centre as basic to our common citizenship? There is, in fact, a fundamental tension between devolution and territorial equity. We badly need a concordat between central government and local authorities to resolve this tension. Tacit understandings are no longer enough.
For Britain is not only a constitutional and political union, but also a social and economic one. That is exemplified in the basic principle of the welfare state laid down by Clement Attlee’s government after 1945 – that standards of public services should not depend on where you live, on a postcode lottery. So the devolution of, for example, health functions, must not transform healthcare so that it becomes a mere series of local services whose quality depends on the clout of local leaders.
Ideally a central/local concordat should be embodied in a constitution, but short of that, a charter could provide principled guidelines, a roadmap of the workings of government and the territorial division of power appropriate to a multinational state.
So two cheers for the white paper, but not yet three.
Vernon Bogdanor is a professor of government, King’s College London. His books include Devolution in the United Kingdom
