Devolution

Joint East Midlands mayor plan would ‘consign Leicestershire to division two’

, ,

I hear very few rural voices in the machinations linked the current moving of the deck chairs around on the Titanic in terms of the latest round of (in terms of the real challenges we face) side show that is local government reform. As someone who has lived in the “East Midlands” region all my life I would suggest that this controversy is about Nottingham, Derby and Leicester… This story tells us:

Leaders in Leicestershire have expressed anger at the region being excluded from a first of its kind devolution deal for the east Midlands, saying it will be “relegated to the second division”.

On Tuesday, plans for a groundbreaking devolution deal between Derby, Derbyshire, Nottingham and Nottinghamshire were announced, which would see the areas grouped as a Mayoral Combined County Authority (MCCA), led by one mayor, and which would receive £1.14bn funding over 30 years.

The plans are part of a new devolution model that would be introduced once the levelling up and regeneration bill is passed, and it is hoped the first mayoral elections in the region would take place in May 2024.

But some said the exclusion of Leicestershire and Leicester, the most populous urban area in the east Midlands, situated about 30 miles south of Nottingham and Derby, would harm the region in the long term.

Brexit, Catalonia, Scotland… Yorkshire? ‘God’s own county’ is pushing for devolved independence

As someone who lives in one of the least defined “regions” England – the East Midlands – I am tempted to ask what all the fuss is about. But then I might be courting controversy and the issues flagged up here are worthy of serious debate. This story tells us:

There’s a wind of separation in the air at the moment. Brexit, of course. Catalonia. But Yorkshire doesn’t want to withdraw from the UK – it wants independence of a different kind: the independence to spend its share of public funding where it’s best needed.

Some context. Yorkshire as a region has a population of almost 5.4 million, greater than that of Scotland. It’s economy is bigger than that of Wales. It has an area of nearly 12,000 sq km, comprising coastline, mountains, miles of open countryside and cities. Three of the 10 largest cities in the UK – Leeds, Sheffield and Bradford – are in Yorkshire.

Yorkshire devolution: Archbishop of York urged to end deadlock

All of this goes to show that traditional structures, no matter how poorly they work are very hard to change! This story tells us:

An MP pushing for Yorkshire to become a “country within a country” has appealed to the Archbishop of York to help end a stalemate plaguing the devolution process.

John Grogan told a parliamentary debate he had written to John Sentamu and asked him to intervene and assist the 17 Yorkshire councils who are calling for the region to receive devolved powers.

The “One Yorkshire” deal would see the region come together under one mayor, with control over transport, education, and business rates.

Mr Grogan, the MP for Keighley, said the plan would create the second most powerful mayor in the UK after London’s Sadiq Khan and put Yorkshire on the Northern Powerhouse map.

“Here in Yorkshire we feel we’ve got a population of five million, about as big as Scotland, a £100bn economy, a big strong identity,” he said. “But we’re losing out on investment and so on because we haven’t got devolution.”

But his plans were left dead in the water when Northern Powerhouse minister Jake Berry said it was “absolutely clear” there was no collective agreement on the proposal.

Mr Berry said the Government would not consider a Yorkshire-wide devolution deal, adding that the Conservative Party was in the process of selecting a candidate for the Sheffield City mayoral election in May.

In response, Mr Grogan said he had written to the Archbishop of York “asking him to consider calling a meeting of all those involved in the devolution process to try and make some progress, which the people of Yorkshire sorely need.”

Five devolution bids from across Yorkshire have been submitted to the Government for consideration since September 2015.

The One Yorkshire deal – the sixth proposal to be presented – was put forward in August 2017.

Just one of the deals has been approved by the Government – the Sheffield City Region deal – but it collapsed in September when Barnsley and Doncaster council leaders voted against the plan in favour of the “One Yorkshire” deal.

Councils should take devolved powers now while they still can

We had a protracted discussion about devolution at the RSN conference a couple of weeks ago. There was very little enthusiasm for the idea of a super mayor in most rural areas represented. This story therefore gives much food for thought. It tells us:

It was a package worth £900m, which would have delivered better transport links and more housebuilding, and improved skill provision in Tyne and Wear. But last week, leaders of four of the region’s seven local authorities voted against proceeding with the devolution deal that the region had spent nearly a year negotiating. Nonplussed, the communities secretary, Sajid Javid, immediately pulled the whole thing off the table, in a move that raises serious questions about where the devolution agenda goes next. Is Westminster’s determination to devolve power to cities starting to flag? Or is it councils that are losing their appetite for more powers in the face of austerity?

On the face of it, the devolution deal is a casualty of Brexit. Regional leaders wanted assurances that they would get all their European money up to 2020 and beyond, but the government would only guarantee projects signed before the forthcoming autumn statement.

Many in the north-east believe the European money was merely a proxy for problems that have dogged the negotiation process. The government requires devolution to be accompanied by a new, directly elected regional mayor, heading a combined authority with powers over transport and economic development. Some of the north-east’s Labour leaders saw this as a challenge to their authority.

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.

Without clarity and local scrutiny we risk the prize of devolution

,

I like this opinion piece. I used to get heartily sick in local government of civil servants making judgements about whether the council should be allowed to do this that or the other, many of whom had no experience of delivering anything themselves.  It turns the tables and gives those negotiating devolution packages a “must do better” score. It also bears ongoing witness the preponderance of those lower down the chain continuing to blur the high rhetoric of national policy with a nit picking approach to detail. Some things never change – the article tells us:

Around the country, the government is doing deals with a patchwork of local areas to devolve powers over economic development, further education, skills, regeneration, transport, public health – and perhaps more in future.

These devolution plans are undeniably a positive move both for local government and local people. The potential prize is huge: direct local power exerted over services and issues that were previously planned and delivered from London.

You’d expect this would be accompanied by plans to ensure that devolved funding and powers are subjected to robust, meaningful accountability. You’d assume, too, that government was working towards some overarching policy objective. The National Audit Office (NAO) has noted that the sums are very large – tens, even hundreds, of billions of pounds over the next five years. But accountability for that spending, and a coherent sense of what it is meant to achieve, is difficult to find.

The approach government has taken to putting these deals in place has been ad hoc and inconsistent. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. We’re told that devolution deals are bottom up, that local objectives should be defined by local areas, rather than arbitrary objectives set by Whitehall, and that inconsistency between areas is actually a hallmark of a devolution process being driven by local needs.

But behind the scenes, ministers and civil servants have sought to tinker and engineer those deals to a surprising level of detail. We’re told, too, that government has no framework or plan that it uses to conduct negotiations – but good management practice suggests that it must do, to learn lessons from the first deals and improve the quality of the negotiations on the tranche of proposals now being considered.

Osborne’s devolution experiment will hit poorer councils where it hurts

Before reading this article I was reflecting on how a 56% cut in grants would affect rural authorities compared to urban ones. We have had to raise more of our finance democratically through rates for years. Im not sure I am fully persuaded that all the bad news in this new regime will be for those now having to get used to the same principle as this article suggests – for example these sort of authorities do not face the rural premium – the article itself tells us:

Alongside this heavily constrained handover of authority comes a great claw-back of central funds and a showering of new responsibilities. Some cutting of central grants is a logical corollary of decentralisation, but since 2010 the cuts have shown scant regard for the health of the local tax base. The Institute for Fiscal Studies calculates that purchasing power of the councils that depend more on grants is down by nearly 40%, around double the decline in the least grant-dependent boroughs.

Northern Powerhouse ‘could end up like Big Society’

,

There is still considerable cynicism about the Northern Powerhouse concept being a mirage. We have two stories in Hinterland this week. This one brings a questioning approach to the concept. The article suggests:

The Northern Powerhouse is “a concept yet to catch fire” that could go the same way as the “Big Society” scheme, a leading politics professor has said.

The claim was made after a BBC-commissioned survey found two-thirds of respondents either had not heard of, or knew nothing about the powerhouse.

The Northern Powerhouse policy attempts to redress the north/south divide and attract investment to the north.

Some businesses said the plan is already helping win export contracts.

Professor Jon Tonge, from Liverpool University, said: “It is a concept yet to catch fire. I wonder if it will head the same way as the Big Society. Who remembers that?

“The problem is it is only a concept. It is also offset by huge cuts to the councils in the north.

“Even those who have heard of it are cynical. Those who haven’t heard of it think at most it’s the idea of a concept – where is the clear plan?”

Devolution revolution? Not until there’s real public service reform

Thoughtful article with rural resonances for local government this by Jo Casebourne at the Institute for Government. It tells us:

Countless attempts to join up public services – from Tony Blair’s new deal to David Cameron’s troubled families project – have ultimately failed to translate into system-wide change, and collaboration between organisations remains rare. Our report identifies three big and recurring challenges to devolution:

  • Short term policy and funding cycles can restrict the ability of local organisations to invest in long-term partnerships.
  • Misaligned geographies and the patchwork of commissioning, funding and regulatory processes can make it difficult for local organisations to design services around a “whole person”.
  • Cultural differences between professions can discourage collaboration and make joining up services like health and social care more difficult.

This is not to say devolution is the wrong policy – it just needs to be done in the right way. Public service reform requires new ways of working at all levels of government – local, central and frontline. These include:

  • Understanding and sharing effective models and practices. We need to know which models of joining-up are most effective in improving outcomes for citizens and how this varies across different sectors and places. We also need to find out the most effective ways of sharing good practice for frontline professionals.
  • Putting powers and capabilities in the right areas. Key questions remain about who should receive the powers on offer in devolution – individuals, communities or places – and what powers and flexibilities local areas need to join up around citizens. This will also no doubt mean change in Whitehall to better support local areas.
  • Getting the right leadership and governance in place. We don’t yet know what types of local scrutiny arrangements will bring a real focus on citizen needs in efforts to join up different services.

Campaigners want to ditch George Osborne’s Yorkshire devolution plans and create Northern Powerhouse

I have to say all this chat about northern powerhouses could be marginalia. I suspect London will continue to grow and drive the economy as its global city hub. We need a parallel debate about rural-urban interactions in England. Still old ties die hard and this article tells us:

Now campaigners want to ditch George Osborne’s city-region devolution plans and make England’s largest county the real Northern Powerhouse. They hope to re-establish Yorkshire’s ancient boundaries and build a “White Rose Parliament” to give the region control over its own destiny once more.

The grassroots county-wide devolution movement brings hope to people on the fringes of Yorkshire who were “severed” from the county in unpopular local government reforms in 1974.

However, the campaigners’ demands have put them at loggerheads with the great Yorkshire cities of Leeds and Sheffield, which are pursuing devolution proposals of their own that could see them having to establish city mayors.

Nigel Sollitt, chairman of the Yorkshire Devolution Movement, which wants a Yorkshire based on old county boundaries to have a regional parliament, said: “Yorkshire as an entity pre-dates Scotland and Wales. You can date it back to 626AD to King Edwin. We have 1,400 years of history and heritage, and we think devolution should be arranged on that basis.

Load More