No one designing a system for delivering public services in a modern democracy would come up with something that looks like English local government. The patchwork of overlapping structures has evolved through generations of gradual reform. It is poorly understood by voters. A majority routinely abstain in council elections.
The government is simplifying the system, ending the duplication of functions between county and district councils. That restructuring project will be combined with a renewed push for devolution in England. Here, too, existing arrangements are inconsistent. Some cities and wider metropolitan areas have been organised into combined authorities with directly elected mayors, each with bespoke powers. Transport and housing policy, for example, might sit under a different tier of government in a different part of the country, depending on whether a devolution deal was done.
Labour’s policy, overseen by Angela Rayner’s communities and local government department, is for all of England to be covered by the mayor-led combined authority system. Six regions are to be fast-tracked, with plans due soon. Local government reorganisation and the push for devolution are related projects that mostly complement each other. But there are tensions. Devolution deals must be ratified by local authorities, which means councillors who don’t like one part of the proposed changes might, depending on the sequence of reform, wield a veto over another part of the plan.
Central government policy could become a hostage in the transition. Sir Keir Starmer has pledged to build hundreds of thousands of new homes, to which end the government also proposes planning reform. But housing policy, as currently implemented, relies on the lower tier of local government, which is due for dissolution in many areas.
The choreography of overlapping reforms is not simple. Shuffling the structures risks becoming the primary focus, consuming money and administrative capacity that are already in short supply at local and central government level. A proliferation of jurisdictional turf wars and partisan squabbles to define new roles could become a distraction from the task of delivering better public services, which is – or should be – one of the reform’s benefits.
A sound principle is driving the changes. British politics has been far too centralised for too long. A successful series of changes would create areas of jurisdiction that are big enough to be laboratories for policy innovation, benefiting from economies of scale, while being local enough that communities feel connected to their leaders, who can then be rewarded for success and held accountable for failure.
The truly gamechanging move would be fiscal devolution, but the Treasury jealously guards control over tax-and-spend levers. Chancellors have always suspected, with justification, that the incumbent party at Westminster would take the blame if local politicians misused their financial autonomy. But caution starves councils of agency. The people best placed to understand problems in their area lack the means to develop solutions. Hoarding power centrally for fear of “postcode lotteries” never prevented regional economic disparities.
Sir Keir’s government has understood that something needs to change. The current reforms clearly fall short of the desired effect of empowering local democracy. Simplification is overdue. The danger is that scarce resources end up being tied up in a reorganisation of the machine, at the expense of the services that machine is supposed to deliver.
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