As the current phase of local government reorganisation ponders on, I can’t help but to share some deepening frustrations with the state of the state. The biggest issue I anticipate emerging from the current devolution agenda and round of local government restructuring is this. Devolution purports to offer places more power over funding, services and growth, powers ostensibly relinquished by government. Itself not a small ask. But the geography benefitting the most from this is a regional one: combined authorities covering multiple existing council footprints. At the same time the administrative geography that comprise these combined authorities is being restructured through a process that is radically reducing the number of councils in England.

Let’s be clear: at the same time as the government is promising to devolve decisions and powers out of Westminster and into the hands of those public bodies that are closer to our communities, it is also in the process moving those public bodies further away from communities. By abolishing somewhere around 150 principal authorities and replacing them with perhaps 40 (it’s all still up in the air, but the direction of travel remains), the whole of England’s almost 60 million population will be governed by in the region of 200 ‘local’ authorities – of which 34 cover London alone. Does that not sound crazy?

Our decision-makers will be more remote than ever from the communities they are elected to serve.  

It seems the government’s solution is to have as few local councils as possible while consolidating power within emerging regional structures. Both tiers are getting bigger and more remote from communities. Seen from a community perspective – which, after all, is a vantage point we all have in common – devolution is replacing one two tier structure with another. Only one where both tiers are now based on geographically bigger footprints.

Wherein lies the devolution paradox.

Greater local accountability is being offered while simultaneously time being taken away. My parents, by way of example, were facing the prospect (before the process was paused this month) of voting for a councillor based in a town 50 miles away that they’ve rarely been to and have nothing in common with, and a new mayor covering Norfolk and Suffolk, an area the size of Cyprus, who might – say – be based in Ipswich, 70 miles away.

I don’t deny the need for some regional structures – but ones based on regions that make sense to people socially and economically. As we saw in part 1, this requires a clear analysis of form/function informed by local social, economic and physical geography. A mayor covering Greater Manchester can drive improvements best addressed at that strategic level across a geography that probably makes sense to those that live there. A mayor covering Norfolk and Suffolk less so. The same strategic issues in a more sparsely populated rural area are probably best addressed at either the county level or a larger region (as we had with the former Government Office East). It is these strategic issues that are the big-ticket areas ripe for devolution and local decision-making: transport, economic growth, infrastructure, housing growth, and so on.

I am an advocate for local government as the corner-stone of our local democracy, with functions and powers devolved through the principle of subsidiarity. Organisations with elected officials with the powers to actually do things and make a difference in our communities – that’s what makes it worth turning out to vote. People who can address local issues and concerns, the things that really matter to local people because, unfixed, they chip away daily at our sense of pride in place and build our frustration in the ability of anyone to get things done.

At the very time we need, arguably, more investment in and support for communities up and down the country, restructuring is seeing a physical retreat of the public sector from our communities, while at the same time, in a policy sleight-of-hand, we are being told that devolution is the answer.

Some might argue, practically or ideologically, that this is ok. Save the money, reduce my council tax. What do local authorities do for me anyway?

But don’t we all deserve to have some sense of control over the decisions that affect our lives and those of our families, neighbours and friends? The unintended consequences of this paradox might be subtle to spot at first. But over time it becomes apparent. We’ve seen the impact of the policy of austerity over the last 15 years, the impact of systematic disinvestment in out public services. If we now withdraw public institutions from our everyday and civic life, what follows then? What signals does that send about the importance of local democracy, of accountability, and of the importance of our communities and the very places we live?