Insights: The Band on the Titanic Strikes Up ‘Devolution!’ – Part 2

Published on: 28 Dec, 2024
Updated on: 28 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…

See Part 1 here.

By Bernard Quoroll

Reorganising local government is not easy and the compromises it creates are often unpalatable.

Local government in the UK is incredibly divergent and complex. Areas large and small lying geographically close to each other can be wildly different in politics, opportunity and aspiration. Whitehall civil servants and politicians, even those who spent periods as elected councillors, seem to become profoundly ignorant of the variety of local aspirations once they become MPs and impatient when attempts to make all areas look the same come to dust.

Whitehall civil servants have for decades continued to believe that they know best and do not understand what it is like to work in daily body contact with local people and politicians. Successive governments of different political persuasions have learned lately that it is no longer prudent to act transparently because their centralising ambitions become too obvious.

In recent decades they have instead resorted to backroom deals with local politicians of different parties, promising to give back powers previously held locally but, in fact, removed via even earlier reorganisations. In exchange, local politicians get limited, heavily supervised pots of money via performance agreements, which meet the needs of central government more than local aspiration.

They call this deal-making “devolution” – but could not be further from true devolution. The prize for local politicians, of course, is an opportunity to direct some resources back into their own communities and to gain some political kudos – but at what price?

By holding out a modest pot of gold, local politicians are being persuaded to carve up community interests locally themselves, while being trained in the mentality of the deal. In that way central government is getting local government to do its work for it. It is sadly the only game in town.

Devolution deals have so far mostly related to the regional priorities of metropolitan authorities north of London, which are mostly the priorities of central government. Regional services are those which can affect the economic prosperity of large, often metropolitan areas, and have a national flavour. The services that are important at a regional level are those which drive jobs, transportation, training, employment, energy, large infrastructure projects and industrial-scale planning.

These are the areas where central and regional priorities are most likely to align and be least locally controversial because for governments, the economy is always the highest priority and who does not want more jobs and better transport in their own communities?

The aim now appears to be to extend and somehow conflate this approach to non-metropolitan areas in the south. The problem with that is that in non-metropolitan areas, opportunities for expenditure on projects related to regional economies are more limited.

At some point, voters will get to understand that key social infrastructure, not limited just to care services and the needs of older people, but education, libraries, the environment and many more, are being left behind. The reality is that local government delivers around 450 discrete services throughout the country, and all are still under a financial cosh. The White Paper is just a distraction from that. It provides an appearance of action and change but not the substantive response that is needed.

The band is still playing on the Titanic but no one is listening.

Tomorrow in Part 3: The problems of redistribution when used as a smoke screen for the withdrawal of central funding…