Insights: The Band on the Titanic Strikes Up ‘Devolution!’ – Part 1

Published on: 27 Dec, 2024
Updated on: 27 Dec, 2024

By Bernard Quoroll

Bernard Quoroll served as chief executive or a senior officer in six local authorities.

He says that the radical proposed changes in the English Devolution White Paper are akin to rearranging the deckchairs on the sinking Titanic and will leave England as one of the most centralised western democracies in Europe.

His insights, in three parts, are worth reading…

Understanding “Devolution” – a few things to think about…

By Bernard Quoroll

This is the fourth time during my working lifetime as a former council chief executive that governments have proposed a wholesale reorganisation of local government, although reorganisation by stealth on a more regional basis has most recently been the order of the day.

The fundamental questions – how local government is paid for and how it is to be made financially accountable – have never been addressed and have once again been passed over in this latest White Paper.

Until funding and accountability are addressed, local government will continue to be the handmaiden of central government, and we will remain one of the most centralised western democracies in Europe for the simple reason that he who pays the piper calls the tune. Nor does the White Paper say anything meaningful about the impending bankruptcy of local government, itself a direct result of the previous government’s fiscal policies. Deckchairs on the Titanic comes to mind.

It is always declared forthrightly that combining councils will save money. I am not aware of any past reorganisation where that has actually been proved.

No one ever looks back. In the early 1990s, when it was proposed to unify the five districts of Buckinghamshire into a single unitary, I demonstrated that four unitary boroughs could be run more economically. Even the county finance director himself was compelled to sign off the spreadsheet showing that this was the case, even though county councils in those days employed more layers of more senior staff and paid higher salaries allowing more potential savings than there would be today.

Once you factor in the true costs of transition, disruption, redundancy payments, new offices and many other factors that politicians gloss over, the picture begins to look very different.

There are also many less quantifiable costs which never get considered. The jobs market becomes frozen. Good people start looking for safer places to work, taking their hard-won local experience elsewhere. It can take years to recover from reorganisation and some councils with proud histories of success in delivery don’t always recover.

Ideal population sizes for new unitary councils are commonly spirited out of the air. This time the figure being quoted is 500,000. This is higher than ever before because otherwise the latest narrative would not work.

There are many perfectly viable and successful councils which have much smaller populations, and which are much closer to the communities they serve. Five hundred thousand is simply huge. Depending on the geography and demography, councils of that size are invariably quite remote from the people they serve.

Adopting such a number also encourages the formation of new and expensive town and parish councils as consolation prizes. Such councils serve a purpose but have no meaningful powers, no ability to change things on the ground and their ongoing costs are also conveniently erased from political memory but still have to be paid.

A local authority should be the living, beating heart of its community – not just the deliverer of government-mandated services.

Do you know where Surrey’s headquarters building is? When did you last meet your county councillor?

It is far more than just a numbers game. People identify with communities and have loyalties on many different levels. Guildford people might be happy enough to be linked to Godalming but how do they feel about profligate Woking or distant Spelthorne?

Is anyone even bothering to ask voters this time?

Remember too, the bigger the council, the smaller the influence that locally elected people can have on the outcome of strategic votes about the location of wanted and less wanted forms of development or spending priorities in the budget.

We already have the least representatively sized councils in Europe. We should ask ourselves why central government should want councils to be even bigger and more remote.

It’s because it suits the needs of central government over local government, which is often perceived as a nuisance or barrier to progress. So in centralist terms, the fewer councils the better.

Tomorrow in Part 2: Transparency makes centralising ambitions become too obvious…