English local government’s conceptual challenge
Researcher
Every policy area, on occasion, overstates its importance. Financial situations are always perilous and, with a little creativity, every new idea can be billed as a win-win: pro-growth, pro-community, preventative and painless. Having said that, I do not believe one can overstate the unique and leviathanic changes English local government is experiencing.
A successful Devolution Priority Programme will mean almost 80 per cent of England’s population live under mayoral devolution – something which until 2017 only Londoners experienced. Two-tier counties have been a feature of English local government for more than fifty years but they are now being abolished. And showing the tourism tax ankle means genuine fiscal devolution may be on the way.
As these changes have played out debates have coalesced around a few familiar points. Mayors need more powers. Local authorities need more funding and workforce capacity. Accountability needs strengthening. Communities need to be involved. None of these are wrong per se. Amongst devolution advocates these are broadly accepted as prerequisites for an effective and financially sustainable system. Communication is now the main challenge: ensuring momentum is maintained and scepticism overcome.
Yet a conceptual challenge remains. Momentum is being maintained… towards what? Does devolution have a victory condition? And are certain choices, overlooked problems and baked-in features making this harder to achieve? In my view, this challenge remains unanswered.
For the moment this is probably fine. We are in the honeymoon period – fawning over every new Mayoral Strategic Authority (MSA) created and growth fund announced – and attention is, rightly, upon ensuring change continues. But it needs addressing soon if the present political will to radically reform English local government is to be fully capitalised on.
For me, two such unanswered questions stand out.
Are MSAs the right size?
Are MSAs with populations below one million people really big enough to function as a genuinely regional tier of government? As we argued earlier this year, it is hard to answer this with anything other than a resounding no.
Cambridgeshire and Peterborough, York and North Yorkshire, and Tees Valley Combined Authorities all contain fewer than one million people – far below the population size of regional governments in comparable countries. The proposed Cumbria Combined Authority would be even smaller. A population of 500,000 places it closer in size to a humble local authority.
Insufficient scale limits what these MSAs can achieve. They cannot meaningfully tackle regional policy challenges – since they are not really regional in scale – and their small tax bases make serious fiscal devolution unviable.
Perhaps it is fine to focus on ‘filling in the map’ and just establish Foundation Strategic Authorities: worrying about the size of MSAs can wait till later. Larger MSAs – involving more local authorities – are harder to establish while North East and West Country examples demonstrate the possibility of retrospective mergers and expansions. Nonetheless, I still find the reticence to contest these choices odd.
Is low turnout in local elections a problem?
Devolution could theoretically improve local electoral turnout. Bringing politics closer to communities, so the argument goes, provides more opportunities for participation and traceable outcomes. Alongside a range of other pleasant factors – visible local leadership, clearer accountability lines, renewed civic pride – turnout rises.
Clearly, this has not come to pass. Turnout in local elections remains stubbornly low and half of the 27 MSA elections held since 2017 have failed to reach 30 per cent.
It is easy to dismiss worries about low turnout. Who cares how many people voted in some Suffolk council election when the economy is stagnating, public service costs ballooning and climate crisis unfolding? Fine. Then insufficient ballot box accountability permits politicians to avoid the difficult-but-necessary decisions, thus worsening local conditions and making it harder to course correct.
Furthermore, as discussed at last week’s RTLS Conference, higher turnout can ‘de-risk’ decisions. More voters means more perspectives. This reduces the dominance of organised minorities, makes problems harder to sweep under the rug and expands the conceivable mandate for tricky trade-offs. Accordingly, government’s primary objective should be boosting turnout because it is a singularly upstream factor, potentially capable of making all other actions and choices easier to navigate.
One could claim simply improving ‘delivery’ will result in galvanised communities newly appreciative of the State’s prowess and ready to participate. This may well be true. Still, the notion that faster economic growth and reliable trains will start a march towards higher local electoral turnout strikes me as doubtful and risky.
Addressing this conceptual challenge will require answers to many other questions beyond the two discussed above. Do councils have a future? What does ‘empowering communities’ mean? What exactly is devolution’s end state – will EMSAs be able to propose additional Devolution Framework powers indefinitely? These are hard questions and I certainly do not know the answers. But, to fully seize the present opportunity, having convincing responses is as important as acquiring powers to raise a tourism tax or set post-16 education and skills policy.