Elected mayors could be as remote from the public as Whitehall
According to this story before too long, most people living in England will find they have a directly elected mayor in their area, making big decisions on transport, economic development, skills, further education, and possibly public health and policing. These mayors will sit at the heart of devolution deals, agreed between central government and local areas, which will see accountability and responsibility decentralised.
Beyond elections, there will be quite limited local mechanisms for holding these mayors to account. True, combined authorities – bodies made up of elected councillor leaders from across the area – will have a role in decision-making. These combined authorities in turn must establish overview and scrutiny committees of local councillors, to hold decision-makers to account – mirroring the arrangements which apply to most local authorities.
But the existence of these new structures is not in itself a guarantee of accountability. There needs to be an active effort by mayors and local councils to ensure these arrangements really work in the way intended.
What will happen if we fail to develop robust systems for accountability at local level? The first risk is that devolution will be anything but – a decentralisation of responsibility while power remains firmly at the centre. A tussle of power and responsibility between those at local and national level will only ever be won by Whitehall, which has the interest and the power to maintain the status quo.
The second is that devolution will fail to deliver the outcomes which have been promised. The only way that devolution will be a success is if local politicians are able to take more power to develop and implement creative, exciting ways to improve local people’s lives. Poor or non-existent accountability will lead to services feeling and looking just as remote as they have done when directed from London.
This moves us on to the question of how councils might go about creating these systems. The Centre for Public Scrutiny (a body which I chair, and which is funded by the Local Government Association to provide independent advice to local authorities on governance-related issues) has recently suggested that groups of councils forming themselves into combined authorities for the purpose of devolution should develop a governance framework.
This framework would set out how councils would develop policy and make decisions, how they would monitor and review their performance and – critically – how the public would be actively involved in this work. It also proposes that, throughout the devolution process, there are repeated opportunities for engaging the public, and a wider range of elected councillors, which should be capitalised upon. As deals are finalised, proper planning needs to go into designing high-profile ways for elected councillors to challenge and hold to account the way deals are implemented, modified and recast.
It’s not too late to pick up that task now, but the further government and local areas go down the road of assuming that all good governance hinges on the power and role of the mayor, the greater the risks in not recognising that accountability is about much more than that one person. I hope that those currently thrashing those deals out pause to think about scrutiny, about accountability and about the public – and act to ensure that the decisions they make properly represent what local people really want and need from the state.