combined authorities

Cyclopean ‘local’ government and the end of local democracy?

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Chris Game

As with another quite recent blog of mine, it’s important to start with the alert that most of its style, structure and content stem directly from its having been written in the first instance not for an academic readership, but as a column for probably this week’s Birmingham Post. There are a few additions and subtractions, plus, barring a dramatically uncharacteristic Lowtherian intervention, one guaranteeable difference: the title.

At the time of writing this intro I don’t know for certain what the Post editor’s choice of words and punctuation will be – except that it won’t comprise nine words, including three longish ones. Space and layout, you understand. It will, however – because regular authors do have at least some bargaining ‘say’ – open with that key word that many/most Post readers will barely recognise.

To summarise the whole thing: here in Britain we already have, and in England, following last December’s devolution White Paper, are about to develop still further, a scale of ‘local’ government that makes a complete mockery of the term ‘local’; and the present Government, with no noticeable public consultation, is embarked on increasing that non-local size still further – to truly Cyclopean dimensions.

And, as I sought to explain to the Post editor, by introducing this concept, rarely if ever used in modern political debate, both the Post and I will become – well, you never know – possibly a little bit famous. Here’s the reasoning.

First, ‘Cyclopean’, used in the context of local government.  Ancient Greek, pretty obviously, it originally described an architectural style in which the walls, towers and other fortifications of ancient cities like Mycenae (a 70-odd mile day trip SW of Athens) were constructed from massive limestone boulders – of the scale shown in the accompanying illustration – fitted extremely closely together without apparently having been substantially reshaped and without use of mortar or cement. 

So preternaturally impressive were these city constructions – the hilltop Mycenae was perhaps the most famous, but there were numerous others – that the myth developed that they must have been built by the Cyclopes, a race of superhuman giants in Greek mythology, and the only humans physically capable of creating such constructions. Hence ‘Cyclopean’ – to describe the assumed method and scale of a city’s governmental architecture, not the size of its residential population.

Somehow, though, towards the latter end of the 3,500 intervening years, the UK has developed, to an almost unique degree, its own interpretation of ‘Cyclopean local government’. Yes, there are loads of large buildings – Birmingham’s Council House and Central Library for starters, the Octagon, etc. – but there’s no Cyclopean mystery about what holds them together. Put crudely, it’s the concrete and steel, not some mystical manpower.

The UK’s, and particularly England’s, modern-day local government and its latest structural ‘reform’ have become almost entirely about scale. Instead of referring to the governance of, or provision of services for, a particular local community and its unique character, England’s ‘Cyclopean local government’ currently comprises just over 300 ‘local’ authorities, with populations averaging 180,000 – which is hardly our (or anyone’s) ‘everyday’ usage and understanding of that term ‘local’.

And yes, averaging. Which, of course, would make Birmingham’s 1.2 million population ‘super-Cyclopean’ – and the West Midlands Combined Authority’s 4 million ‘Mega-Cyclopean’. Or ‘hyper-Cyclopean’, which I personally slightly prefer, suggesting something beyond the bounds of reason, or control. We’ll return to that.

Some quick comparisons or contrasts: average size of German and Italian municipalities is around 7,500, Spain’s 5,700, and France, albeit as exceptional in its way as the UK, 1,900. Yes, slightly under one-hundredth the size of our average, and, by chance, roughly the same as our smallest, the Isles of Scilly, arguably our one ‘municipality’ that wouldn’t make a mockery of the term ‘autorité locale’.

The rest of the world, or first-time observers, find our scale figures as extraordinary as the Ancient Greeks found Mycenae. They are naturally curious as to how we do anything purporting to be genuinely ‘local’ government on such a manifestly non-local scale, and, above all, why.  Good questions, but not for a local newspaper column. Indeed, not for the likes of us mere citizens and voters either, because no one’s bothering to ask us.

The major redesign of England’s local government is currently in the hands of Angela Rayner – Deputy Prime Minister + (in any spare time) Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government.  An early action was to cancel – arguably “legally risky”, if not unconstitutionally (see Google– ‘Cancellation of 2025 English local elections’) – nine May 2025 county and unitary council elections, she/someone in the Government having decided that these bodies had had their day and there would be no room for them in her new, but still undefined, single-tier England.

Rightly describing the UK as the “most centralised” country in Europe (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cn0xz4938z9o), Rayner’s apparent plan is to end central government’s micro-management by making ours, by a distance, the least localised – most Cyclopean – ‘local government’ certainly in Europe, if not the world (500,000 minimum), and, it would appear, without a great deal of consultation.

The ’plan’, in summary, represents the biggest and most transformative upheaval of English local government in my adult lifetime (sorry, you’ll have to work it out!), rushed/bullied through Parliament and local government itself with absolutely minimal consultation and consequential analysis. In short, modern-day Cyclopean local government.

Chris Game is an INLOGOV Associate, and Visiting Professor at Kwansei Gakuin University, Osaka, Japan.  He is joint-author (with Professor David Wilson) of the successive editions of Local Government in the United Kingdom, and a regular columnist for The Birmingham Post.

Picture credit: https://stock.adobe.com/uk/images/odysseus-und-seine-gefahrten-fluchten-vor-dem-zyklopen-polyphem/608942497

Do we need yet another body to help local government harness the potential of AI?

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Dr Caroline Webb, Dr Stephen Jeffares, and Dr Tarsem Singh Cooner

Does local government need a devolved AI service to help the sector successfully harness the transformative power of AI? A new paper from the Tony Blair Institute (TBI) thinks so.

In their recent report “Governing in the Age of AI: Reimagining Local government” TBI make the case that local government faces several significant challenges – there’s a growing backlog of people seeking support coupled withdwindling resources and two thirds of funds must be spent on social care. Satisfaction is declining. Over £1.8bn is spent by the sector on technology, but innovation is stifled by a patchwork of legacy systems. The solution TBI suggest is the universal embracing of AI tools, but which is orchestrated, curated, supported and (one day perhaps) exploited via the establishment of a Devolved AI Service (DIAS).

The adoption of AI by councils continues to accelerate. Vendors of these tools extol the positive outcomes of AI, suggesting that “the day-to-day tasks of local government, whether related to the delivery of public services or planning for the local area, can all be performed faster, better and cheaper with the use of AI” (p3).  The UK, they argue, could save £200 billion over five-years though AI related productivity improvements (p7).

Whilst AI undoubtedly has the potential to increase the efficiency of some public services, we must pause to ask is it really the panacea that it is being marketed as, and are some public services being unfairly targeted by technology firms looking to promote their products and capitalise on an emerging market?

There is a clamour in the social care sector for example, which accounts for 64.8 per cent of the total budget for local government in England, to develop AI tools that can offer significant time savings, with the rationale that workers can spend more quality time with clients and less time on completing paperwork.  TBI cite Beam’s automated note-taking tool Magic Notes, that aims to transform social workers’ productivity by saving them s up to ‘a day per week on admin tasks’. Yet without external scrutiny and verifiable evaluation, such figures are little more than marketing claims.

As these technologies are capturing and summarising meetings to support some of the most vulnerable members of society, there is a need for local councils to interrogate these marketing claims critically before committing to such AI tools.  Despite safeguards such as ensuring a ‘human in the loop’, if these claims are not thoroughly examined there is a danger that these technologies may serve to reinforce and perpetuate existing biases, pose risks to clients’ data privacy and safety, strengthen process-driven systems which undermine person-centred decision making, and erode the relational foundations on which these services are built.

Of course, AI has numerous applications beyond reducing the cost of resource intensive casework. It has the potential to address some of the most despised and most intractable local policy problems (potholes, mould, chronic pain, mental health waiting lists). But the desirability of these innovations should not cause us to forget that these technologies themselves are not neutral, and just as they can lead to positive outcomes, if they are misused or implemented without proper ethical considerations, then adverse effects are just as likely to emerge.

The proposed introduction of a Devolved AI Service may go some way to ensuring a set of standardised safeguards, allowing for a coordinated approach to AI adoption within public services.  This collective approach could reduce duplication, provide practical support for the implementation and evaluation of sector-specific AI tools and facilitate a collaborative approach to working with technology providers to improve their products.  However, is it necessary to impose another central regulator on Local Government? There is already considerable piloting and evaluation of AI tools being conducted at the local level. These sector-specific evaluations are facilitating opportunities for shared horizontal learning across organisations. But it is vital that these results are shared, and that the evaluative measures and methods being employed are not imposed by the vendor of the tool, but rather determined by the needs of the organisation and the people they serve. Such evaluation should also consider more than value for money or accuracy, but also the experiences of frontline staff and citizens.

Ultimately, irrespective of how we chose to oversee the integration of AI tools, we must not lose sight of the fact that these tools should only be viewed as ‘part’ of the solution to providing effective public services, not the ‘whole’ answer as some technology companies may lead us to believe.

Dr Caroline Webb, Dr Stephen Jeffares, and Dr Tarsem Singh Cooner are academics at the University of Birmingham exploring how AI is reshaping frontline public service. Combining expertise in social work, public policy, and digital ethics, they develop training and research that support practitioners to engage critically and confidently with emerging technologies. Their work champions ethical, human-centred innovation in public services.

Dusting down the cautious welcome: Initial reflections on the devolution white paper

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Phil Swann

When I was director of strategy and communications at the LGA I was frequently criticised, by the late professor John Stewart among others, for issuing press releases “cautiously welcoming” one Blairite initiative or another.

The criticism was probably justified, but I would definitely have deployed that phrase in response to the government’s recently published devolution white paper.

There is undoubtedly a lot to welcome, not least the stated commitment to devolution, the additional powers for metro mayors, the revival of strategic planning, its reference to struggling small unitary councils and the focus on audit and standards.

There are, however, at least four reasons to be cautious.

First, every serious reformer of local government since George Goschen in the 1860s has argued that local government finance and structures should be reformed together. No government has ever had the political will or energy to do so. This government has also ducked the opportunity. As a result, this white paper will not fulfil its potential.

Second, the current mess and confusion in the structure of English local government is the result of incremental change. Just think of Peter Shore’s “organic change” and Michael Heseltine’s ill-fated Banham Commission. There is a real danger that this government will run out of restructuring energy or time. The contrast with Scotland and Wales, where local government was reorganised in one go, could not be starker.

Third, the effectiveness of the structures being proposed will depend on the quality of the relationships between mayors and councils, between councils and parishes and between ministers and mayors, councils and parishes. In England we are not good at relationships like these and there is precious little in the white paper to signal the trust, effort and imagination that will be needed to make these relationships work better than the previous ones did.

Finally, key to the revival of local government and effective devolution is a revival of citizen engagement in local politics and local governance. Word has it this will be addressed in a forthcoming white paper, but it should be central to this one.

So, a very cautious welcome it is.

Phil Swann is studying for a PhD on central-local government relations at INLOGOV.

ELECTED MAYORAL GOVERNMENT – SOME INLOGOV ANGLES

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Chris Game

This blog was prompted partly by Vivien Lowndes’ and Phil Swann’s recent INLOGOV blog giving “Two cheers for combined authorities and their mayors”. Substantively, anyway, although the decisive stimulus was the realisation that most, if not all, of those present at the relevant ‘Brown Bag’ session would probably have been unaware that seated among them was the co-author of almost certainly the most comprehensive examination of this topic by any INLOGOV colleague over the years.

I refer to the appropriately labelled ‘long-read’, also masquerading as an INLOGOV blog and entitled Briefing Paper: Elected Mayors, published shortly before the 2017 elections of what I think of as the second generation of elected mayors – and produced by Prof Catherine Staite and a Jason Lowther.

Catherine, nowadays an Emeritus Professor of Public Management, had recently stepped down as Director of INLOGOV, in which capacity she had, among numerous other initiatives, both launched and regularly contributed to our/her blog. And, while I certainly recalled reading the Briefing Paper, I confess that, with his name meaning little to me at the time, I’d forgotten her co-author. Apologies, Jason.

He claimed, moreover, that he himself had “forgotten” it (email, 14/5), which I didn’t, of course, believe … until, a few days later and following some ‘research’, I discovered one of my own INLOGOV blogs, on the Magna Carta and 800 years of Elected Mayors, which I really had totally forgotten. Whereupon I realised too that I couldn’t actually recall much of what Catherine, I and other colleagues contributed to that decade of debate on elected mayoral evolution.

So, the remainder, the structure, and – I fear – the length of this blog were prompted, yes, by much of the media coverage of this month’s elections, and the sense that the spread and substance of mayoral government over the past decade aren’t fully recognised even by those who supposedly follow these things; and also by the notion that it would be a pleasing mini-tribute to Catherine to do so by identifying and italicising particularly some of her and colleagues’ INLOGOV blog contributions on these mayoral matters over the years.

We start, however, for the benefit of comparatively late arrivals, at the beginning of not the blog, but the concept. Mayoral government is a postulation you might expect to have found a supportive, even enthusiastic, reception in an Institute of Local Government Studies and it mainly did, albeit with perhaps a certain reservation. Directly elected mayors (DEMs) had played a fluctuating role in the Blair Government’s local government agenda from the outset. London, noted in Labour’s 1997 manifesto as “the only Western capital without an elected city government”, would have a “new deal”. Which took the form in 2000 of the creation of the Mayor-led Greater London Authority – in the manifesto, so no referendum required. Probably no reminder required either, but they’ve been: Ken Livingstone (Ind/Lab; 2000-08), Boris Johnson (Con; 2008-16); Sadiq Khan (Lab; 2016- ).

The Local Government Act 2000 then provided all English and Welsh councils with optional alternatives to the traditional committee system. Chiefly, following a petition of more than 5% of their electorate, they could hold a referendum on whether to introduce a directly elected mayor plus cabinet. There were 30 of these referendums in 2001/02, producing 11 DEMs – plus Stoke-on-Trent’s short-lived mayor-plus-committee system – three in London boroughs, but most famously Hartlepool United’s football mascot, H’Angus the Monkey, aka Stuart Drummond (Indep).

Ten referendums over the ensuing decade produced a further three mayors, prompting the now Cameron-led Conservatives to pledge in their 2010 manifesto to introduce elected ‘Boris-style’ mayors for England’s 12 (eventually 11) largest cities, with significant responsibilities including control of rail and bus services, and money to invest in high-speed broadband.

These DEM referendums eventually took place in May 2012 – three months after the launch of the INLOGOV blog – and provided a natural topic for early blogs by Catherine and colleagues (Ian Briggs). The referendums followed protracted Whitehall battles over mayoral powers (CG) – as revealed by the then Lord Heseltine in a UoB Mayoral Debate (CG) – a combination of ministerial indecision and interference (CG) against a backdrop of opposition from most of the respective councils’ leaderships, with Bristol the only one of the 12 cities voting even narrowly in favour (Thom Oliver).  

Birmingham voted 58% against, despite Labour’s having in Liam Byrne a candidate raring to go, and Coventry 64% against. There was speculation over whether the addition of a well publicised mayoral recall provision (CG) might have swung some of the lost referendums. But it was what it looked: an overdue, and to some welcome (Andrew Coulson), end of an episode (Karin Bottom);arguably “the wrong solution to the wrong problem” (Catherine Durose).

Since then, the referendums successfully removing elected mayors (Stoke-on-Trent, Hartlepool, Torbay, Bristol) have exceeded those creating new ones (Copeland, Croydon) – though, in fairness, those four removals were more than matched by five retention votes.

A ‘mayoral map’ at the end of that first decade would have looked something like the inset in my illustration of in fact the first 20 years of referendum results – numerous splotches of red for Reject, a few smaller green specks for Accept, and overall a patchy, somewhat arbitrary, experiment that on a national scale never really took off.  

The mayoral concept, though, had also generated interest outside local government – the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), for instance, advocating Mayors for Greater Manchester, the West Midlands, and Liverpool City Region to take the required ‘big’ decisions on housing, transport, and regional development. Prime Minister David Cameron too was a ‘city mayors’ fan, although what scale of ‘city’ wasn’t initially clear, until in 2014 what became known as the first ‘devolution deal’ (Catherine Needham) was announced with the Greater Manchester Combined Authority. Headed by an elected ‘metro-mayor’ (CG), comparable to the Mayor of London, the GMCA would have greater control over local transport, housing, skills and healthcare, with “the levers you need to grow your local economy”.  

New legislation – the Cities and Local Government Devolution Act 2016 – was required, allowing the introduction of directly elected Mayoral Combined Authority or ‘Metro Mayors’ (Vivien Lowndes & Phil Swann) (+ Catherine Staite) in England and Wales, with devolved housing, transport, planning and policing powers.

The Combined Authority elections were held in May 2017 – not coinciding with the General Election (CG) as PM Theresa May had contemplated but, in contrast to Rishi Sunak, chickened out of – with perhaps usefully split results (CG). Elected were Andy Burnham (Lab, Greater Manchester), Steve Rotheram (Lab, Liverpool City Region), Ben Houchen (Cons, Tees Valley), Andy Street (Cons, West Midlands), Tim Bowles (Cons, West of England), and James Palmer (Cons, Cambridgeshire & Peterborough) – followed in 2018 by Dan Jarvis (Lab, Sheffield City Region). The map had started to change – even within the first hundred days (CG) – stutteringly under the less committed Theresa May and/or in several cases where groups of local authorities failed to agree – but eventually dramatically, as evidenced in the larger illustrated map. The Staite/Lowther ‘Briefing Paper’ was well timed.

A few years on, mayoral devolution has trailblazed across the country (CG) to a greater extent than even some commentators on this year’s local elections seemed to have difficulty grasping. As of March 2024, devolution deals had been agreed with 22 areas, covering 60% of the English population – most recently, in late 2022, North of Tyne, Norfolk/Suffolk, East Midlands, York & North Yorkshire; in 2023 Cornwall, Greater Manchester and West Midlands (‘Trailblazers’), Greater Lincolnshire, Lancashire, Hull/East Yorkshire; and so far in 2024 Buckinghamshire, Warwickshire and Surrey.  

From next year, if you draw a straightish line from, say, Ipswich in South Suffolk up through about Alvechurch in South Birmingham, heading for Shrewsbury, at least five-sixths of the bits of England to your north will be under mayoral devolution. Which, to me anyway, seems pretty dramatic news, and considerably more interesting than the endless General Election Date speculation that passed this May for ‘Local Elections’ reporting.

Picture credit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayor_Quimby

Chris Game is an INLOGOV Associate, and Visiting Professor at Kwansei Gakuin University, Osaka, Japan.  He is joint-author (with Professor David Wilson) of the successive editions of Local Government in the United Kingdom, and a regular columnist for The Birmingham Post.

Two cheers for combined authorities and their mayors

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Vivien Lowndes and Phil Swann

There are reasons to be cheerful about the fact that the newest component of English local government, the mayoral combined authorities, were in the headlines this spring. There were also reasons for caution, however, most notably the particular focus on two of the mayoral elections, in Teesside and the West Midlands, as a guide to the popularity (or not) nationally of Rishi Sunak and the Conservative Party.

This fact that combined authorities were in the news is a prompt to take stock of their development and impact with some thoughts stimulated by the discussion at a recent INLOGOV Brown Bag[1] session.

The media attention was attributable to the mayoral elections, with many of the incumbent candidates having established a national profile by, for example, challenging the government’s approach to Covid (Andy Burnham in Greater Manchester), defying political gravity and weak governance (Ben Houchen in Teesside) or crafting a new brand of active, compassionate Conservatism and challenging the government’s pruning of HS2 (Andy Street in the West Midlands).

The mayors have also disrupted the escalator assumption of British politics in which ambitious politicians use local government as a stepping stone to parliament and government. Burnham, Liverpool City Region’s Steve Rotherham and the new mayor of the East Midlands Claire Ward have each moved in the opposite direction.

The metro mayors undoubtedly have higher profiles than most council leaders. They have demonstrated impact beyond their statutory remit through soft power, particularly their ability to convene discussions and galvanise action on issues such as public health and homelessness.

Doubts remain about the sense of vesting so much power in a single individual. Only three of the twelve metro-mayors are women, showing the danger of equating ‘strong leader’ with ‘strong man’. More effort is needed on the part of political parties to diversify their mayoral candidate selection.

It is also valid to question whether, for example, an elected mayor in the West Midlands would have added more value as part of the city council’s governance rather than that of the wider city region. Some would argue that the city would benefit from the type of focussed political leadership that Mayor Jules Pipe provided in Hackney. Experience in both Liverpool and Bristol suggests that having a mayor at both city and city region level causes confusion.

There has been very little discussion about the role of council leaders as key players in the governance of combined authorities through their membership of the mayors’ cabinets. As one council leader in Greater Manchester is quoted[2] as saying: “We have to work with a mayor we did not want while he has to work with a cabinet he did not chose”.

The Greater London Authority model is very different, with a separately elected London assembly as well as a mayor. While this may seem more democratic, public awareness of the assembly is far lower than that of the mayor[3]. Perhaps it is time for a comparative review of these two very different sets of governance arrangements. In both cases, there is a strong argument for greater public involvement outside of the electoral cycle, both in setting up new combined authorities and to inform ongoing priorities.

The role of council leaders is inevitably linked with the wider question of the relationship between the combined authorities and their constituent councils. To date this has proved to be remarkably smooth, particularly given the often toxic precedent of county-district relations. The next period may be more testing. To date, councils and metro mayors have been united in coping with austerity, but difficult decisions about priorities will have to be taken should a new government make limited additional resources available. The increased interest of combined authorities and mayors in strategic spatial planning and housing will also raise challenging and potentially divisive issues.

The jury is out on the extent to which the establishment of combined authorities has led to substantive devolution of power from central government, although progress has been made in areas such as adult education, transport, health (in Greater Manchester) and mental health (in the West Midlands). While the new ‘trailblazer deals’ in Greater Manchester and the West Midlands promise a single funding settlement with central government, other combined authorities find themselves still bogged down in competitive bidding for relatively small pots of money.

One important feature of combined authorities is the way they are creating opportunities for innovation and testing new ways of working at a local level. To fully exploit the potential of this development it is important that arrangements are put in place to capture this learning and share it between combined authorities, and especially with newcomers like East Midlands, North East and York and North Yorkshire. There is also potential for metro-mayors to speak with a stronger collective voice in challenging and informing central government on issues affecting local and regional governance.

Finally, it is important to remember that combined authorities did not begin with a blank sheet of paper. The GLA and many of the combined authorities have similar boundaries as the GLC and metropolitan counties which were abolished by Margaret Thatcher in a fit of political pique in the 1980s.

Harold Macmillan pioneered regional arrangements for devolved delivery with regional boards to promote industrial productivity during the second world war and regional housing production boards to help meet his 300,000 a year housing target in the 1950s. Neither were well-received in Whitehall. John Prescott followed with his regional development agencies, abolished by Cameron’s coalition government, and his failed bid to create regional assemblies. What marks out combined authorities is the lack of a ‘one size fits all’ approach, with size, functions and governance arrangements varying around the country.[4] Indeed, only 50% of England’s population live in combined authority areas (so far).

Given this rocky terrain, it may be rash to vest too much hope in combined authorities and their mayors. But they clearly have the potential to disrupt our centralised politics and join-up aspects of regional governance after decades of damaging fragmentation.

Vivien Lowndes is Professor Emerita in the School of Government, University of Birmingham.

Phil Swann is studying for a PhD at INLOGOV in the Department of Public Administration and Policy, University of Birmingham, on the contribution of politicians to central-local government relations.

Picture credit: https://www.birminghammail.co.uk/black-country/sir-keir-starmer-walsall-pledges-29162669

[1] INLOGOV’s Brown Bag sessions are informal monthly discussions on events in and around local government bringing together academics, researchers, students, practitioners and alumni. For further details please Phil Swann ([email protected])

[2] Blakeley, G and Evans, B. 2023 How metro mayors are getting things done – even if they have limited money and power. The Conversation June 28 2023.

[3] According to London Elects (londonelects.org.uk) in January 2020 58% of people were aware that a mayoral election was taking place compared with 32% for the assembly election (down from 40% in 2016).

[4] Durose, C. and Lowndes, V. 2021. Why are designs for urban governance so often incomplete? A conceptual framework for explaining and harnessing institutional incompleteness, Environment & Planning C: Politics & Space, https://doi.org/10.1177/2399654421990;

Durose, C. and Lowndes, V. 2023. The pros and cons of messy devo (themj.co.uk) Municipal Journal 

Zilch for timing, but this Resolution Foundation report is important

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Chris Game and Jason Lowther

If you wanted some serious reader attention for something West Midlands local governmenty, you really, really wouldn’t have chosen this past November. The war in Gaza was seriously hotting up, there were the COP 28 talks in Dubai, Christmas was coming, and Aston Villa were en route to becoming the Premier League’s “foremost home team”, whatever precisely that means.

Serious distractions, but competition for headlines was only part of the challenge facing the Resolution Foundation’s early November release of its In Place of Centralisation report setting out a proposed and far-reaching Devolution Deal for London, Greater Manchester, and the West Midlands. There were other diversions and potential confusions too.

It was barely a month since Birmingham City Council – the principal West Midlands local authority involved in this proposed ‘Devo Deal’ – had issued not one but two Section 114 notices, reportedly declaring itself doubly “bankrupt”, unable to meet the Council’s financial liabilities relating to Equal Pay claims and an in-year financial gap within its budget, and handing over its governance to Communities Secretary Michael Gove’s appointed Commissioners.

And, if that wasn’t potentially complicating enough – for those directly affected as well as onlookers – in that same previous month representatives of the West Midlands Combined Authority (WMCA) had ratified the “Deeper Devolution” aka “Trailblazer” deal announced in the Chancellor’s March Budget.

That deal, comparable to that agreed by Greater Manchester back in March, but relatively little of which we’d heard in the meantime, would devolve more powers to ‘Metro-Mayor’ Andy Street (or, given the May Mayoral elections, potentially his successor), the 30 WM local authorities (7 met boroughs, 4 unitaries, 19 districts) and their 6 million population, and simplify funding arrangements, with £1.5 billion to spend on long-term infrastructure projects and services such as transport, skills, housing and regeneration.  A key element is a single block grant negotiated with the Government, like a central government department, as part of next year’s Spending Review.

Key ‘highlights’ include:

  • A ‘landmark’ housing deal worth up to £500 million, offering greater flexibility to drive brownfield regeneration and funding to deliver “affordable housing at pace”;
  • Greater control over local finance, including retention of an estimated annual £45 million of business rates for the next decade [hold on to that version of ‘local financial control’!];
  • Up to six ‘levelling up zones”, backed by £25-year business rate retention, with an estimate total value of at least £500 million, to target investment and encourage regeneration in areas agreed with the Government;
  • Measures to tackle digital exclusion, including greater influence over high-speed broadband investment across the region and a £4 million fund to get more people online.

In anywhere other than one of the most centralised governmental systems in the developed world, describing this package as ‘trailblazing’ would be wildly OTT. Here, though, it was rightly welcomed as constituting serious devolutionary progress, and Mayor Street, not surprisingly, was enthusiastic, seeing it as “marking the beginning of the end of … the ‘begging bowl culture’ where we must regularly submit bids for various pots of money on a piecemeal basis.”

Here’s the thing, though – well, two things, actually. First, the really rather big thing. The leading West Midlands council in this new ‘Trailblazer’ era is currently, following the issuing of those Section 114 notices, (a) in severe financial straits, and (b) being run until quite possibly 2028 not by elected councillors, but by Lead Commissioner Max Caller, his associate commissioners and political advisors – none of whom have ‘Trailblazing’ as a core part of their brief.

The second and, in Birmingham’s current circumstances, almost other-worldly thing, is the Resolution Foundation’s In Place of Centralisation report which is, incidentally, not the first RF report to be covered in these pages. It’s other-worldly too in the sense that it’s just one, albeit important, product of a bigger, wider-ranging academic project: The Economy 2030 Inquiry – a Nuffield Foundation-funded collaboration between the Resolution Foundation, an independent think-tank, and the LSE’s Centre for Economic Performance.

UK economic growth is their primary project – not boosting local democracy – one persistent obstacle to the attainment of which they identify as “the decades of underperformance of the big cities of Manchester, Birmingham, and more recently London” – the key cause being, they reckon, the centralisation of the British state. No startling news to INLOGOV blog readers, but a contrasting starting point to, say, that of the authors of Trailblazer deals, and their prescriptions go a good deal further.

They start (p.4), unsurprisingly, from a different array of statistics, demonstrating the extreme centralisation of the British state.

Only 5 per cent of the UK’s tax revenues in 2019 were collected by local    government, compared to 14 per cent in France, 23 per cent in Japan, and 35 per cent in Sweden. Accordingly, local government relies on grant funding, with only 19 per cent of all local spending in the UK funded locally, compared to 37 per cent in the average OECD unitary state.

They concede that “recent advances in devolution have begun to unwind this”, but, following a decade of austerity, significantly further fiscal devolution is required to improve growth without increasing inequality – in the form of a ‘triple deal’ negotiated between the Government and the Mayors of Greater Manchester, the West Midlands, and London as a trio, going “beyond the recent ‘trailblazer’ deals” and into which other mayors would be able to opt in the future.

The core of the triple deal would be fiscal devolution, “which would help to end the centrally-imposed local government funding crisis for the three cities by widening the local tax base, and resourcing improvements in the local economy.” Everyone would be a winner – the mayors, borough and Exchequer all benefiting from a new revenue-neutral fiscal settlement, including (pp.4-5):

  • A local share of income tax receipts, with Greater Manchester and West Midlands keeping a larger share than London;
  • Complete retention of business rates, and control over the ‘multiplier’;
  • A single grant to the mayors distributed on a per person basis;
  • The ability for mayors to reform council tax.

It would then be up to the mayors, in negotiation with the boroughs, to distribute this revenue across local government’s various responsibilities across their city. And in the medium-term?

Well, big IF … but the higher growth in the three cities that would be “likely”, if this fiscal devolution were accompanied by other policy changes, would then translate into higher local tax revenues for the mayors – with, by 2038, Greater Manchester raising between £49 million and £230 million, and the West Midlands between £40 million and £187 million beyond their current level of funding.

That was from p.5 of what is a 64-page report, so there’s a very great deal more explanation and explication. But the key, and hopefully obvious, point of this blog is to enable you, if it crops up in conversation, to disabuse anyone of the notion that the Resolution Foundation’s contribution to this debate is just ‘Trailblazer deals’ writ large.

Our view is that the current local government finance system is bust. Business rates penalise high street shops, the council tax is regressive with hopelessly outdated valuations, and councils spend too much energy chasing central government largesse through competitive funding pots.  Democratically elected councils rely on a begging bowl and lack basic revenue raising powers that are commonplace internationally.  We will be saying more on this as the General Election approaches…

Chris Game is an INLOGOV Associate, and Visiting Professor at Kwansei Gakuin University, Osaka, Japan.  He is joint-author (with Professor David Wilson) of the successive editions of Local Government in the United Kingdom, and a regular columnist for The Birmingham Post.

Jason Lowther is Director of the Institute for Local Government Studies (INLOGOV) and Head of the Department of Public Administration and Policy at the University of Birmingham.