What are we to make of the recent devolution white paper1? On the one hand there is bold ambition in the expansion of a sub-regional level of governance and a desire to move towards co-terminosity of key public services (notably with health and policing boundaries). I have always felt that the core way to drive up engagement and voting is to create a local government with real power to make a difference to local communities and places, and not simply manage the implementation of government policy. It also signals a return towards needs-based funding allocations and away from the smokescreen of competitive bidding for pots of government cash, both of which, as I’ve argued here, are to be welcomed.
On the other hand the proposals represent a significant upscaling in the units of governance, drawing them further from the communities they serve, which seems to run counter to the notion of devolution. It’s hard not to conclude that this is a technocratic devolution of power to fewer councils, making the relationships with central government easier to manage, and with an economic focus on saving costs and improving local growth but without the real economic reforms of council tax and business rates that are desperately needed. It’s clearly not a community-centred solution that empowers all those in our towns and cities to take control of the necessary resources and opportunities to respond to their local needs.
Does this policy paper offer diamonds in the rough or will it prove to be fool’s gold?
A few days after publication it’s clear that while the paper has generated some noise amongst the policy classes, there is precious little conversation in the national media about the proposals. On the one hand I find this quite surprising because it proposes a fundamental re-drawing of the English local government map; on the other, local government is not that enticing a subject to most people. As with so many issues, it remains off the awareness radar until it becomes salient and any changes directly impact someone. There are also (anecdotally) some pretty depressing and generally unfounded opinions held by people about the role and performance of local government. It is the misunderstood and slightly awkward child of the public sector, with Counties the eldest and District councils the forgotten middle child.
The paper proposes, in effect, a significant upscaling in the size of the local administrative state. District and county councils (in multi-tier areas) will be abolished and new unitary councils (to be known as principal authorities) created on a roughly 500,000 population scale. I’ll come back to that shortly. There will also be an extension of the sub-regional administrative state whereby Mayor-led strategic authorities will cover a footprint of a number of principal authorities. So in a nutshell we move from district and county councils with a patchwork quilt of combined (sub-regional) authorities, to principal and strategic authorities, both on much larger scales. Local democratic accountability will never have felt less local.
The issue of local democracy is touched on only sporadically throughout the paper. We were already a country with the lowest number of elected representatives and largest administrative units2; this is set to get worse under these proposals. It is hardly a coherent narrative; it tends to very from suggesting reducing the number of elected councillors is a good thing:
“Local accountability: Unitary councils provide local people with a clearer picture of who is accountable for service delivery and local decisions, requiring fewer councillors and local elections. In Cumbria, unitarisation reduced the number of councillors by two thirds and replaced seven council leaders with two; these simpler structures reduce the considerable demands on all involved, and mean the area now only needs two local elections every four years”3
and that these proposals at the same time strengthen local democratic accountability:
“We will recognise the vital role of local councillors as frontline community convenors4”;
“Councillors will play an important role as the delivery arm of this project, with the respect and resources they need to get the job done”5;
“…council leaders and executive members are once again able to genuinely shape their places, while frontline councillors are empowered to convene local people to engage in their community as respected leaders” 6
Let’s turn to look in a bit more detail at this issue of population size. The figure of 500,000 seems to be one of those urban myths that haunt the sector with no-one recalling exactly its source. The paper offers no justification for this, ostensibly perpetuating the myth. Searching for the optimum population size that is both big enough to achieve economies of scale while remaining localised enough to understand and deliver for local communities (and thus stimulate electoral turnout) is the local government holy grail7. We end up in this paper favouring the former, implementing the Economist’s solution, as I set out here, grounded in the assumption that bigger is best and underestimating the costs of transition (the hidden costs, such as lost productivity, are rarely accounted for). A focus on population as the core driver of scale also ignores other factors that impact costs and resources: the number of businesses, land available to support growth, assets, infrastructure to be maintained, and so on.
What does this mean in practice? My interpretation of the white paper is that existing unitary council won’t be looked at unless there are compelling performance reasons to do so. Yet the range of population size of English districts8 (ie, local authorities excluding County councils) is bewildering. Only eleven of the 296 districts meet this 500,000 population threshold. At one end of the scale is Rutland, a unitary with a population of less than 50,000, at the other Birmingham, at 1.157m. The median is South Tyneside, population 148,000. Let’s look at Leicestershire and London to unpack this population issue.
Leicestershire9 comprises six districts and is the most likely alignment with Rutland, a combined population in the region of 750,000. Too big for a single council you might think. The grit in the machine is Leicester City council, which is already a unitary authority and with a population of around 375,000 within bounds of tolerance for the new sizes. Yet a two-unitary ‘donut’ solution with the unitary city in the middle surrounded by a second unitary council seems as mad in Leicestershire as it did in Norfolk – and without boundary changes the outer ring continues to constrain the growth of the inner ring. With a total population over 850,000 both these counties look like they need to be split in half to make it work, as was recently the case in Cheshire. While splitting these counties into two is likely to be divisive along many lines, keeping them as a whole is not conducive to local administration. And then there’s London, with its 32 boroughs ranging in size from 150,000-400,000 population, surely ripe for a similar rationalisation, but with no mention in the paper. A total population of 8.8m would suggest almost halving this number.
To overcome these challenges of scale we will enter a phase of designing the emperor’s new clothes. Some local engagement mechanisms will have to be put in place in any council covering half a million people, whether they are called area forums, committees, etc. Lots of teams operate at a neighbourhood level, from Environmental Health officers investigating noise complaints on a Friday night to leisure staff running sports centres and housing teams looking into HMOs. The level of local knowledge within (mostly) district councils is an asset that doesn’t how up in ay balance sheet or calculation of cost savings. The weaknesses of such a large scale model of local government is that the smaller building blocks will have to be recreated administratively. How, for example, can a principal authority covering Norfolk manage relationships with nearly 55010 parish councils?
Finally, the word devolution still evokes a framing of the power holder (central government) needing to be persuaded to let go of aspects of that power despite a stated desire to end the ‘parent/child’ relationship11 between central and local government. The language of devolution deals reinforces the frame that any such power trade-off must be contracted for in an agreement that sets out who will do what and what will happen if the terms of that contract are broken; the elements of power that are relinquished are to be negotiated from a predefined list; and so on. I’ve written about this before. The proposal to remove the requirement for central government to micro-manage local decisions (the example given is of cycle paths) is a welcome one. Let’s extend that more broadly as principle to underpin this work. What if we started with a conversation about which functions are best performed at which scale? That would get us beyond structures, as I have previously argued, and into the actual work of government.
A devolution white paper that sets out an ambition to give local authorities the mechanisms to create local change and improve quality of life is to be welcomed. But it’s in the execution of ambition that we find out what the real purpose is. We must be aware that the price we are being asked to pay for achieving devolution is to vastly increasing the scale of such authorities and therefore their remoteness from the communities they serve. Devolution to fewer and bigger authorities, strengthening the relationships with central government, reducing the pain of some of the levers of change… all these are proposed without a commensurate narrative around the role of community engagement, voice and co-production. To what extent, I am left wondering, can a true devolution white paper not have community voice within it? Or at least offer proposals and mechanisms to ensure local voices – our voices – are heard as the paper is turned into legislation and implemented?
Read my policy and practice paper on Local Government reorganisation.
References
1 English Devolution White Paper: Power and partnership: Foundations for growth (16th December 2024) https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/english-devolution-white-paper-power-and-partnership-foundations-for-growth
2 See for example table 1 in https://www.researchgate.net/publication/23549951_Will_Consolidation_Improve_Sub-National_Governments. This analysis will only have got worse with the consolidations in the last almost twenty years.
3 White paper, page 102
4 White paper, page 17
5 White paper, page 24
6 White paper, page 98
7 See the analysis by Emeritus Professor Colin Copus here https://www.local.gov.uk/lga-independent/our-work/publications-independent-group/political-and-governance-implications
8 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_districts_by_population
9 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leicestershire
10 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_civil_parishes_in_Norfolk
11 White paper, page 17
Ian Burbidge. 
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